We can. There are chimpanzees in neuroscience laboratories that perform repetitive tasks all day, every day, while they have electrodes hooked in their brain. It's actually disturbing that we submit them to this.
Here is an example: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep34685
> Procedure
> The experiment consisted of training and test sessions. We used ten versions of the pictures described above. Five pairs (1 and 32, 2 and 27, 3 and 23, 5 and 19, 8 and 15 hours) were used in the training sessions. When the chimpanzees touched the start key at the centre of the touchscreen monitor, images from one of the pairs were displayed side by side. The chimpanzees’ task was to touch the image of the fresher cabbage out of the two alternatives. Once the chimpanzees had chosen one of the two images, the stimuli disappeared. A food reward and chime were given for the correct response. A buzzer sounded when the chimpanzee made an error. Following a trial where the chimpanzee made an error, a correction trial, where only the correct image was presented, took place. The correction trials were included in the methodology to keep the chimpanzees motivated.
We could absolutely use chimpanzees to perform labeling of data for ML. But we shouldn't.
> Each session consisted of 30 trials.
> The experiments took place over eight days, with the chimpanzees participating in five test sessions per day in order to cover all of the novel combinations within a day.
The study just affirms my point that it is hard to make monkeys do stuff for extended amounts of time or the experiment would have progressed much faster. The only way we have to motivate them is to give them food directly after completing a small task, and that motivation doesn't really work in the long run. You can't make them do an hour long task and then give them something.
Edit: Humans however have been shown capable to toil away with no reward whatsoever for years just to achieve some arbitrary goal or reward they believe exists. If this was just a question of degree then it shouldn't have been hard to get monkeys to do a days work with no rewards. Humans aren't a thousand times smarter than monkeys.
Humans are considered much less exceptional than they were in the 1950s.
I'd say our big edge over other species is the scale of our social networks. For example, apes can have economies where they trade currency, but that economy is going to be limited to a single tribe.
I have never seen a study showing this. Where did you get this data from? You can make nonhuman mammals follow their instincts all day, but we can't extract much value from that. You can't make them do arbitrary tasks that are physically and mentally within their means all day. You can train animals to do a task once easily, but you can't train it to continue doing said task for the entire day so it can get fed by the end of the day.
OK, I'm done with this forum.
Where humans and dogs start to deviate is with tasks that require much more contemplation or require many steps. But dogs "in the moment" behavior seems to be shockingly similar to humans.
(This rational capability needs much practice -- both in the group and the individual -- to become something approaching reliable.)
Although being a mammal favours the development of some co-operative behaviours (which vary according to environmental pressures), the other very unique characteristic is the theory of mind, i.e. the tendency to ascribe agency and even psychology to events and other beings.
Sophisticated co-operation, language, and patterns of social cohesion begin in this perception/assumption of agency. Sophisticated reasoning then follows as the perception/assumption of agency proves a correct guess and humans begin to think together. (Dennett's hypothesis about debugging thought.)
An unfortunate result of the theory of mind is the chaos of human delusions.
Aren’t we? Look at Recaptcha
Edit: If you lack that level of reliability you will be diagnosed with a psychological condition of some form. So we absolutely expect humans to reliably override their feelings using rational reasoning.
> And that was a theme that cropped up again in Professor Blumin’s class, that there were two great working class traditions that echoed through the ages, and they were
> 1) avoiding work and 2) drinking
...
> Those great satanic mills, where women and children worked in shifts at great water- or steam-driven sewing and spinning machines, stories of little kids getting their hands mangled by the machinery? One of the major reasons women and children were preferred was because they would actually show up on time every day, and stay sober around all those hand-manglers.
https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/96390732283/happy-la...
For example, we aren't using millions of mammals to sit and label machine learning models all day. It is not because they can't create those labels, mammals are really good at a lot of tasks, it is because we can't make mammals sit and repeatedly do a task all day even when rewarded. They just lack the reasoning capacity to override their intuition to do it.