I can’t prove anything to anyone on the internet because I don’t think it’s the right place and also mostly I’m just not qualified in that area but human babies have remarkable cognitive abilities and can decipher complex languages with very little data. I see rationales to define that prowess as more predictive and intuitive than statistical. Probably a bit of everything though.

Besides, what is intelligence? You could very likely define it as inextricably bound to life itself which disqualifies software programs to begin with. Depends on who will give you the definition I suppose.

“If you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”

I see this everywhere, it’s the logical fallacy equivalent of “everything that’s rare has value”.

I’m sure most people, on the top of their head, can think of at least 3 products that are free to use and aren’t engineered to leverage their private information (Wikipedia anyone?)

What is true though, is that if you’re not paying for the product or service, SOMEBODY ELSE definitely is. So the question is: “who is paying for me? And why are they paying for me? What is at stake for them?”