These people are confusing learning with intelligence. The latter is a property of a conscious being while a lot more beings have the ability to learn, a basic

These people are confusing learning with intelligence. The latter is a property of a conscious being while a lot more beings have the ability to learn, a basic example would be genetic adaptation or immediate environmental adaptations in plants, neither of which could be considered intelligence. Learning is an automating activity, when you've learnt something it means you can do it without being intelligent about it, on 'autopilot' as it were. A crucial aspect of intelligence is the denial of learning when appropriate, i.e. not acting according to learning, which seems to be a conscious, prefrontal cortex related ability, and hence closely connected with anxiety and suspicion. Evolutionarily learning works well with slow changes in evolutionary pressure, intelligence gets useful when the pressure is erratic and evolutionary signals are unreliable in mediating information about how to survive and reproduce efficiently. The AGI believers in the capitalist class aren't alone in confusing this, learning is much simpler and more immediately rewarding than intelligence so the bourgeoisie has made learning their ideal for all of modernity and replaced educational exams based on more or less intelligent conversation with formal measurements of learning.