I was curious what that means in this context and found this research (co-authored by Prof Chittka mentioned in the article): https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
Apparently only a small minority of bumble bees can figure out how to pull a string to access a reward, but then other bees adopt the behavior by mimicry. IMO I think we're doomed to move the goalposts on intelligence for a while, like with the statistical abilities of LLMs to manipulate language and insects' ability to use tools. Moravec's paradox keeps rearing it's ugly head as more and more complex systems turn out to be relatively easy compared to basic cognition (the system that keeps them flying and identifies threats, flowers, etc.).
It'd take a lot more to convince me that bumble bees are conscious just because of the their brains' simplicity compared to humans or other animals that appear more intelligent like pigs, corvids, octopuses, etc. I'm not categorically against such a possibility, but I think the bar for recognizing intelligence in general has been set too low.
This sidesteps the main problem anyway: What is consciousness? I don't think we're any closer to rigorously defining that anymore than intelligence.
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Europe
I think the reason Starbucks stays afloat is not their coffee, but their 900 calorie "coffee drinks", which they market such that people can pretend to be coffee snobs while drinking what are essentially milkshakes.
Edit: ref CGI, there's a few apps on there that do that as well (e.g. fish tank temperature monitor). Nice thing about a small private network is being able to do CGI scripts in bash/whatever without having to worry too much).
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-03-05/cortical-labs...
In short - we are a long way from being able to simulate a nervous system. Our knowledge of neuronal biochemistry is not there yet.