Dogs are clearly intelligent, sentient, and social beings very much like ourselves.
I think one of the major innovation of humans (and speculatively cetaceans such as orcas too) was story-telling.
Then later, when we humans started writing down our stories, entirely new levels of social complexity were achieved.
Are stories an important aspect of "intelligence?"
I don't know.
Looking at any ant-colony as a single organism it's very clear that the colony has a sort of intelligence in the way it responds to it's environment.
One can attribute similar sorts of intelligence to fungal colonies and plants. We are just now learning that plants, even across species boundaries, communicate in various ways, and even more fascinating, sometimes using fungal intermediaries.
What we humans call intelligence is simply a large box of tools. What we recognize as "intelligence" is measured against our own human toolbox.
Underlying intelligence it's all just chemistry. Nothing "woo" here. No religion, no mysticism. Not even any "emergent" properties. From my perspective any theory that "consciousness is an emergent property of the brain" is just more human mysticism.
Personally I'm not a big fan of human exceptionalism. It's blinded us to most of what's going on in the minds of species we share the planet with, even blinding us to even recognizing broad classes of intelligent behavior. For all our talk of "pattern recognition" we are blind and stupid, defining intelligence as the patterns we humans tend to recognize, but clueless about the rest.
If, by some unlikely circumstance this existing civilization doesn't entirely collapse in the manner typical of any innovative species experienceing exponential population growth, then "intelligence" in machines will continue to be an incremental process, just as it was in the evolution of natural life on earth.
My preferred answer to the Fermi Paradox is that the earth and universe are teaming with intelligent life. We are simply too dim and unintelligent to see it. We won't even recognize what intelligent life there is here on earth, creatures we share common ancestors with.
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