bird intelligence

A short BBC clip in which David Attenborough shows a lyrebird imitating sounds, including camera shutters, car alarms and chainsaws. It comes from the BBC natural history series Life on Earth.

A short BBC Earth clip from David Attenborough's Life of Birds showing a lyrebird imitating sounds, including a chainsaw and camera shutter, so accurately it is hard to tell from the real thing.

Benn Jordan's video about storing a PNG image in a living bird, a starling that learns to reproduce encoded sounds. It mixes ornithology, audio engineering, and data encoding.

A one-minute clip of a crow repeatedly sliding down a snowy roof on a small lid, apparently just for fun.

Amateur footage of a Thomsonfly 757 ingesting a bird on takeoff from Manchester, with a flaming engine and a safe return, with 233 people aboard.

Cockpit camera footage of a jet hitting a bird after takeoff, losing its engine and the crew ejecting. Commenters note it is actually a Canadian CT-155 Hawk despite the F16 title.

A short demonstration of a crow using a purpose-built vending machine, in which the bird exchanges objects for rewards. The creator sells the machine as a kit.

A short BBC Planet Earth clip from the Pole to Pole episode showing the courtship displays of birds of paradise.

Retired Major Brian Shul tells the story of a ground speed check with LA Center while flying the SR-71 Blackbird. He recounts it live at the Hiller Aviation Museum.

A BBC Earth clip from Inside the Animal Mind in which a crow named 007 solves an eight-step puzzle to get a reward. It showcases crow problem-solving.

Steve Hsu's 2011 Google Tech Talk reviews psychometric measurement of intelligence and the heritability of adult IQ, then discusses genome-wide association studies seeking the genes behind cognitive ability.

Lex Fridman interviews Marcus Hutter of DeepMind about universal artificial intelligence, AIXI, Kolmogorov complexity, Solomonoff induction and the idea of intelligence as compression.

Maker's Muse designs a 3D-printed and laser-cut puzzle box to test whether wild sulphur-crested cockatoos can solve it. He documents how the birds work it out.

SethBling uses Super Mario World glitches to inject and run Flappy Bird code on an unmodified SNES, entering it purely with controller inputs. It was the first time a human completed this kind of exploit by hand.

Robert Miles explains the orthogonality thesis: how an agent can be highly intelligent while pursuing goals that seem stupid or alien to humans. He separates intelligence from goals and touches on the stamp-collector example.

Festo's promo video of SmartBird, an ultralight bionic flying model inspired by the herring gull that flaps and twists its wings to fly. It shows the robot in flight.

A clip of psychologist Jordan Peterson lecturing on intelligence and IQ, covering how it is defined and its correlation with academic and work success.

Lex Fridman interviews Jeff Hawkins, founder of Numenta and author of On Intelligence, about the Thousand Brains Theory and reverse-engineering the neocortex. They also cover Hierarchical Temporal Memory and brain-inspired AI architectures.

In a long live-coding session, Andreas Kling works on making the Cookie Clicker game playable in the Ladybird browser from SerenityOS. He tracks down bugs in the browser engine and fixes them.

The full 1973 BBC Lighthill debate on artificial intelligence, featuring James Lighthill, Donald Michie, Richard Gregory and John McCarthy. It documents the argument that preceded the 1970s AI winter and includes early robot demos.

A short 2019 clip of Chuck Schumer's January 2017 warning to Trump that the intelligence community has many ways of getting back at him.

A silent PLOS ONE video of New Caledonian crows solving Aesop's Fable puzzles by dropping objects to raise water and reach food. It shows example trials from experiments testing causal understanding of water displacement.

A BBC Earth clip from Super Powered Owls in which the team uses sensitive sound equipment to compare owl flight with other birds. It shows why owls fly almost silently.

A short BBC clip narrated by David Attenborough showing crows in Japan using city traffic to crack nuts, dropping them at intersections and retrieving them when the light changes.

A Jordan Peterson university lecture on the Big Five trait openness to experience, covering creativity and intelligence. It explains how IQ is measured, how well it predicts life success, and the Pareto distribution of creative output.

Developmental and synthetic biologist Michael Levin speaks at a Harvard Extension student event on bioelectricity, body intelligence and regenerative medicine. He discusses how cell electrical networks guide growth and form.

Andrew Ng speaks at the Stanford MSx Future Forum about how AI is transforming industry after industry, comparing its impact to electricity. The talk also touches on evil-AI worries, jobs and basic income.

An excerpt of Richard Feynman's 1985 lecture Q&A about whether machines can think. He discusses the difficulty of defining what computers can never do and compares machine intelligence to machines that don't copy animals.

A panel from the Beneficial AI 2017 conference moderated by Max Tegmark, with Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, Kurzweil, Hassabis, Harris, Bostrom, Chalmers and others. They discuss likely outcomes of human-level AGI and what outcomes are desirable.

A BBC Earth clip from The Hunt showing Portia jumping spiders, which leap many times their body length and ambush prey larger than themselves.

Bruce Hauman live-codes Flappy Bird in ClojureScript in about six minutes, using figwheel to hot-reload changes into the running game. The demo shows game behavior being changed interactively without restarting.

A full performance of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians by eighth blackbird with Third Coast Percussion and others, recorded in Chicago in 2011. It is an hour-long minimalist piece built on phasing and repeating patterns.

Geoffrey Hinton's 2025 Royal Institution Discourse on what AI has learned from biological intelligence and how it might surpass it. He explains neural networks and argues that human language use resembles what backpropagation-trained networks do.

Veritasium takes an IQ test and examines what IQ measures, its history including military use and eugenics, its controversies, and how it correlates with life outcomes. Experts including Cecil Reynolds and Stuart Ritchie contribute.

John Bird and John Fortune satirize the investment banking mindset in a mock interview about the subprime mortgage crisis. The sketch lampoons structured credit products and the banks' reassurances shortly before the crash.

John Searle's Talk at Google on consciousness and artificial intelligence, hosted by Google's Singularity Network. He presents his philosophy of mind and Chinese room argument that computation is syntactic and cannot capture semantics.

A short clip from a 1973 NOVA episode in which Richard Feynman recalls his father teaching him that knowing the name of a bird in many languages tells you nothing about the bird.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever on time to AGI, what comes after generative models, data limits, alignment, and competing with Google. The title centers on whether next-token prediction could surpass human intelligence.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk introducing Polyworld, an artificial life simulator used to evolve artificial intelligence by designing worlds rather than minds. It presents results from ongoing attempts to evolve intelligent behavior.

BBC Earth shows killer whales working as a pod to create waves that wash seals off ice floes, with the producer explaining how the crew captured behavior once thought a myth.