>When it comes to "understanding of the world", I'd say the average blind person has less. But the gaps in their understanding are generally not particularly important parts.

Is understanding of the world equivalent to intelligence though? In my view intelligence is about optimalising the mapping from the percept sequence to action. In other words, given a sequence of percepts, does it determine the utility maximizing action.

Imagine two chess bots on uneven footing. One plays regular chess with perfect knowledge of the board. The other plays fog of war chess—it only sees the pieces on squares it attacks. In this case, the former could play suboptimally and still win against the latter. The latter can have perfect information about probabilities of pieces on tiles and act perfectly utility maximising in response and still lose. My argument is that the latter is still more intelligent despite losing. There is a difference between action and intelligence.

Similarly a human doesn't become smarter or dumber by adding or removing senses. They may make smarter or dumber decisions, but that is purely attributable to the extra information available to them.

On the other hand I suspect there's a level of board game complexity where being blind (or not having a well-integrated image processor) makes a notable difference in how well you can track the pieces. You have the same information but you don't have the same systems for organizing and tracking that information. You're worse at using that information, which is effectively a drop in "intelligence".

But then how to we compare with dogs who has better smell sense, cats that have better motor skills, birds better orientation and navigation, other animals that better see at night?

There were many people in human history that made big achievement even though handicapped: Ludwig van Beethoven, Steven Hawking, John Nash - but yeah they haven't been born with disabilities so had their all childhood to train their brain.

I generally don't understand this obsession about needing AGI. If current LLMs can be extended to humanoid so just get motor modality and keeping current vision, audio, text ability IMHO they will excel in many fields like currently they excel in text, vision, audio than most humans.

If you gave a dog nose and sharper eyes to a human I think they'd have a measurable advantage. But brain is most important and those animals are not getting anywhere near a human.

I've never heard of cats having better motor skills, can you elaborate on that? They don't seem very good at fine movement.

Depends what you consider better motor skills, but I couldn't fall head first from a two story building, land on my feet and shrug it off. My cat likely could. I'd also struggle to hunt a healthy bird without tools to assist me.

Then again, my cat lacks opposable thumbs and would struggle to draw a line on a piece of paper with a pen.

If you were the size of a cat you'd be pretty well suited to survive that. The flipping reflex is cool but falling that distance is mostly not a motor skills problem.

A cat struggles to move their paw through the air in a smooth straight line.

cats are amazing hunters with great reaction. Most likely small dogs or different animals won't handle such drop from 2 story building so well. Check some 1st person (cat) video to see how they behave, they can analyze and make decision very fast - human reaction time when driving car is very big comparing to cat reaction.

So this is what I find as motor inteligence. If someone can process and think very fast we consider them intelligent and in the same way we should consider cat smart how fast and well they can plan escape from dogs chasing them or they hunting for prey. Imagine how difficult would be to make robot to do this all calculation about different jumps etc.