> if you make the same argument for flight it looks really weak.
flight is an extremely straightforward concept based in relatively simple physics where the majority of the critical, foundational ideas involved were already near-completely understood in the late 1700s.
I think the argument holds. It's not about how straightforward something is, it's that evolutionary time scales are incomparable to the time it takes to purposefully invent something. The ways these goals are achieved are just too different for time comparisons to make sense. If I was living in the 19th century, I could recreate the same argument by saying that it took nature X billion years since life appeared for animals to first take flight, so surely our technology ever catching up to it is improbable if not impossible.
I'm sure that intelligence is an extremely straightforward concept based in relatively simple math where the majority of the critical, foundational ideas involved were already near-completely understood in the late 1900s.
If you read about in a textbook from year 2832, that is.
flight is an extremely straightforward concept based in relatively simple physics where the majority of the critical, foundational ideas involved were already near-completely understood in the late 1700s.
i really don't think it's fair to compare the two