The aliens might also be less intelligent than humans, but more advanced technologically due to the lead time or just higher cooperativity. "Dumb aliens" could be a refreshing premise for a sci-fi story.. although it lies on the same continuum as any ant-like intelligent collective, so it's nothing new after all.

It's a cool idea. I'd bet that it's unlikely for a sufficiently intelligent species (say one capable of creating machines to cross interstellar distances) to stay dumb, though.

Humanity is fast approaching the point where we can edit our genes or otherwise select for intelligence. Even the idea of creating non-human super intelligent agents of some sort is arguably within reach over the course of the next few hundred years.

I like to think that though the starting average intelligence for a given species might be lower than others, eventually we all wind up at the same place, either turning ourselves into or building some hypothetically (given the laws of the universe) maximally intelligent system.

Here's a classic one:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3302567-pandora-s-planet

Isaac Arthur made a video titled “Stupid Aliens”:

https://youtu.be/yXWe8g0zziw

Yeah ancient folks were still smart. Engineers and scientists of all sorts still. I think people often give way too much weight to intelligence, and not enough to just tools.

Give a dude in 1000 a voltmeter and things get crazy.

> By all accounts of you pluck baby from 10,000 BCE and raise it today it wouldn’t be any different than an average person today.

There are people who would disagree with this.

Why ? I've heard that things might have changed 80k years ago when thanks to cultural progress autism went from negative to positive (for the community), but otherwise AFAIK there haven't been any significant changes since the apparition of homo sapiens 350k-400k years ago ?

There is an argument that the mind of people changed a few thousand years ago, part as a cultural phenomenon, part as a genetic selection process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...

(the genetic selection process is mentioned in the book, the wiki abstract puts more focus on a cultural development)

The bicameral mind is an interesting story, but it is not taken as a serious possibility in any branch of science that studies the human mind, as far as I know.

That's a fascinating theory, but also quite a wild claim which seems to be hard to falsify ? (And the link with the matter at hand is even more tenuous, since it's only partially genetic.)

It's a bit like if you were saying that you couldn't teach a prehistoric child to read (but even more exaggerated) ?

Everything so far ago is at least hard to prove/falsify, however this is true either way. I think every possible scenario (prehistorics being of more, less or equal potential) is at least plausible. At least it's easy to come up with arguments for each of these cases (and a hidden one being of different brain specialization).

Not really since we do have DNA sequencing of prehistoric humans.

Whilst we don’t understand the correlation between genetics and intelligence on a sufficient level there aren’t that many genetic differences in fact you can’t necessarily distinguish the age of the sample that easily either unless you are looking at very specific groups.

And as far as modern hunter gatherers go we know that they aren’t less intelligent than urban humans.

People have also claimed, hunters may have been smarter on average. BTW, DNA sequencing does not tell you much. You would need an extremely big sample for comparisons, and even this would exclude methylation patterns and other things.

People claim a lot of things, it doesn’t mean they are of substance.

We have sufficient evidence of advanced tool making and culture spanning back far enough through human history to indicate that intelligence isn't a modern fluke, heck copper mining and smelting dates back to at least 9000 BCE, the pyramids in Giza date back to 2600 BCE which means that we are closer to Caesar to today than Caesar was to the pyramids.

While I’m open to discussion that over 350-400K years some evolutionary steps happened as far as our intelligence goes. But I am more than comfortable with stating that plucking a human from 10K BCE and exposing them to modern education would yield an average human today.

One of my favourite cyberpunk novels was inspired by this, Snow Crash.

Autism is by (original) definition a disorder. If everyone has that disorder, then it is no longer a disorder.

I think many people confuse specializaiton, focus and/or intellect with autism.

I feel that is just one of the definitions of autism ?

Anyway, I didn't want to suggest that everyone had to have it :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25484160