The Rise Of The Machines...

[Brian Peacock]

To me, human levels of intelligence require a conscious understanding of self, the motivations and agency that arise from selfhood, the ability to reflect upon an internal stream of thought, and the capacity for complex language to discuss those thoughts with others. At present, none of those attributes are possessed by either animals or AI.

That describes human level intelligence, but anyone who's lived with animals knows they have environmental- and self-awareness, motivations and agency, and complex languages for intra- and extra-species communication. This is only to say that general intelligence is a spectrum rather than a hierarchy, and that making human comprehensible representational language a condition of the definition tends "intelligence" towards the particular and the circular.

I'm certainly not denigrating the interesting complexities of animal cognition, but I still think there is a significant gulf between their mental abilities and human cognition.

I don't think anyone is drawing an equivalence, and I don't think you're denigrating the livestock! The issues I've mentioned follow depending on whether we're talking about "intelligence" in the general sense or holding up the capacities and attributes of humans as the normative standard by which to judge 'the intelligent' as it were - which is both generalising from the particular and falling into the circularity that saw well-educated white men devising tests which determined intelligence as correlated to their own intellectual interests and concerns.