I suspect the "look at how smart these slime molds are" hype is rooted
in the fact that people see how slime molds are employed(!) to solve
problems that can't be easily solved by a linear algorithm, which seems
to be the sort of problem solving we humens are (currently?) good at.

But people forget that those slime molds are /employed/ to solve the
problem, rather than actively solving the problem on their own -- much
like 1940s "computers" were (literally) /employed/ to design the atom
bomb rather than actively designing it on their own.

Remember that in the 1940s, "computer" was a job description, not a
technical device. But by the 1960s those jobs had been taken over
entirely(*) by electronic computers -- devices which, looking back,
nobody in their sane mind today would call intelligent.

(*Except in Japan, AFAIK, where human computers are still a thing for
some obscure reason.)


So maybe slime molds would make for a great /component/ for building
machines that, some time in the future, might qualify as intelligent.
But by themselves they're not.(**)

(**This is by no means intended to say that 1940s computers weren't
intelligent. They most certainly were. Their job just didn't (normally)
require that level of intelligence /per se/. It's just that intelligence
is pretty much the only tool we humans have at our disposal to train for
such a job.)

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