To be fair, we do have quite a handicap in that respect. A machine intelligence could, at least theoretically, pass around perfect copies of its learned knowle

To be fair, we do have quite a handicap in that respect. A machine intelligence could, at least theoretically, pass around perfect copies of its learned knowledge near-instantly (maybe not though... integrating two neural networks that developed separately might be terribly difficult or even impossible... I wonder if anyone has attempted or studied this? If NNA learns to recognize human faces, and NNB learns to recognize text, is there a way to merge them? It's not like you can just average their weights together, especially if using a method that connects/prunes neurons as necessary). Humans, on the other hand, have to translate bioelectrochemical patterns created in very differently structured networks into flapping of a meat strip rhythmically to cause air vibrations that will rumble a thin membrane of meat, feeding electrical impulses into the differing network, and its success depends upon an expansive, and almost completely unknown (to us), body of similar, but not identical, experiences, from hearing the same patterns of sounds while seeing objects or pictures of objects, possibly decades earlier, to accepting unspoken social cues early in development. What is astonishing is that language works at all. It really, really sounds like it shouldn't have a snowballs chance in Hell. And the weird thing is, I've got this niggling suspicion that this handicap is actually a profound strength. That evolution didn't produce so many species of organisms separated by walls of flesh and bone, detached from one another and capable of wandering far apart, then incapable of even expressing fundamentally novel concepts (I mean novel novel, such that your language has no word for it and such that any metaphor would be more misleading than enlightening). We could have evolved such that when holding hands, a flow of specially produced chemicals seep from ones hand to the other, travelling to the brain and making the changes necessary to convey concepts exactly. Bacteria communicate in this way. They change each other. Directly. We could to. But... we don't. And there is maybe a reason for that.