I had a similar objection and idea for alternative metric (with area and perimeter). But for most countries, the perimeter is ill-defined. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox
To make a stab at the question posed by the title:
We've known the principles of Newtonian physics since, well, Newton.
We'll need an Isaac-Newton-level of insight into intelligence before we can make it so simple.
Nevermind that we can't even seem to agree on the definition of intelligence.
As to the definition, I have an objection to calling the current big-data stats we do nowadays "machine learning" or "artificial intelligence". There is no intelligence there.
Rather, to allude to the article, I consider it more "machine muscle memory" or "artificial intuition". The algorithm can tell you, "I have a really good hunch about this based on the zillions of examples I've seen" but it can't derive underlying truths to reason about why.
Perhaps we are recapitulating phylogeny when it comes to artificial neural systems? We have something like an autonomous nervous system, and a brainstem, but we need so much more to get to intelligence.
Part of this is having played Myst in the 2010s (rather than in its heyday) and comparing it to its successors, but I enjoyed The Witness much more than Myst.
Myst falls down in the same way as many adventure-style games I've played, in that it has too few puzzles.
Each one is self-contained, without much relation to any of the other puzzles in the game, and is dropped in your lap, fully-formed and fully-complex.
As a result, there's a lot of guess-and-check and you can kind of muddle through some of them without any understanding.
As a result of that, while each of the puzzles has its own internal consistency, the whole thing feels very arbitrary.
In comparison, because The Witness has so many (over 600) puzzles, it is able to ease you into full understanding of their logic.
You acquire a mastery of each individual mechanic over a series of puzzles, and nothing feels arbitrary or forced.
Because all of them are the same kind of puzzle, it can combine mechanics with delightfully cohesive results.
I really enjoy this kind of game design, it's the "show, don't tell" of progression (while Myst felt more "don't tell, but don't show either").
I will say that Myst is better at world-building than The Witness (despite The Witness feeling much more consistent).
But I'd rather play a really good walking-simulator and a separate really good puzzle game than a half-baked adventure game combining the two.
(All of this isn't to say you shouldn't try Myst if you haven't. I'd recommend RealMyst for that.)
His handlebars had started slipping. Not badly, he said, just a little when you shoved hard on them. I warned him not to use his adjustable wrench on the tightening nuts. It was likely to damage the chrome and start small rust spots. He agreed to use my metric sockets and box-ends.
When he brought his motorcycle over I got my wrenches out but then noticed that no amount of tightening would stop the slippage, because the ends of the collars were pinched shut.
"You’re going to have to shim those out," I said.
"What’s shim?"
"It’s a thin, flat strip of metal. You just slip it around the handlebar under the collar there and it will open up the collar to where you can tighten it again. You use shims like that to make adjustments in all kinds of machines."
"Oh," he said. He was getting interested. "Good. Where do you buy them?"
"I’ve got some right here," I said gleefully, holding up a can of beer in my hand.
He didn’t understand for a moment. Then he said, "What, the can?"
"Sure," I said, "best shim stock in the world."
I thought this was pretty clever myself. Save him a trip to God knows where to get shim stock. Save him time. Save him money.
But to my surprise he didn’t see the cleverness of this at all. In fact he got noticeably haughty about the whole thing. Pretty soon he was dodging and filling with all kinds of excuses and, before I realized what his real attitude was, we had decided not to fix the handlebars after all.
As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve to propose repair of his new eighteen-hundred dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer can!
Ach, du lieber!
Since then we have had very few conversations about motorcycle maintenance. None, now that I think of it.
You push it any further and suddenly you are angry, without knowing why.
I should say, to explain this, that beer-can aluminum is soft and sticky, as metals go. Perfect for the application. Aluminum doesn’t oxidize in wet weather...or, more precisely, it always has a thin layer of oxide that prevents any further oxidation. Also perfect.
In other words, any true German mechanic, with a half-century of mechanical finesse behind him, would have concluded that this particular solution to this particular technical problem was perfect.
For a while I thought what I should have done was sneak over to the workbench, cut a shim from the beer can, remove the printing and then come back and tell him we were in luck, it was the last one I had, specially imported from Germany. That would have done it. A special shim from the private stock of Baron Alfred Krupp, who had to sell it at a great sacrifice. Then he would have gone gaga over it.
That Krupp’s-private-shim fantasy gratified me for a while, but then it wore off and I saw it was just being vindictive. In its place grew that old feeling I’ve talked about before, a feeling that there’s something bigger involved than is apparent on the surface. You follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations. There was just a feeling on my part that this was something a little bigger than I wanted to take on without thinking about it, and I turned instead to my usual habit of trying to extract causes and effects to see what was involved that could possibly lead to such an impasse between John’s view of that lovely shim and my own. This comes up all the time in mechanical work. A hang-up. You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge.
What emerged in vague form at first and then in sharper outline was the explanation that I had been seeing that shim in a kind of intellectual, rational, cerebral way in which the scientific properties of the metal were all that counted. John was going at it immediately and intuitively, grooving on it. I was going at it in terms of underlying form. He was going at it in terms of immediate appearance. I was seeing what the shim meant. He was seeing what the shim was. That’s how I arrived at that distinction. And when you see what the shim is, in this case, it’s depressing. Who likes to think of a beautiful precision machine fixed with an old hunk of junk?
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance