Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

Perhaps it’s humans that lack the higher intelligence that would allow them to understand that other species may also be intelligent.

I have been repeatedly impressed at how clever crows, ravens, and certain parrots are whenever we figure out how to test them. I've seen videos of Cockatoos figuring out multi-step puzzles, and IIRC, ravens have been able to figure out puzzles with 5+ steps.

I'm not even sure if I can solve a puzzle with 5+ steps :)

I believe it's something like the adage, "it's difficult to make someone understand something their paycheck depends on their not understanding."

Think about people who will tell you lobsters can't feel pain while they're rattling in a pot. The idea we are the only intelligent species, and that everything around us exists only to be exploited for our benefit, is quite convenient.

Edited to add: I think this is also related to the way tech companies view their users. They aren't humans with needs to be fulfilled, they're a resource to be extracted. More a coal mine than a customer. (Not to lob a grenade into the discussion, I just found it relevant.)

Hopefully someone in the field will read this and be able to answer my question:

I've spent a lot of time googling research about animal intelligence, and I now know a bunch of things intelligent animals can do, but I have no idea where their limits are, what they can't do. Everything published uses such... nonflexible tasks.

If we're trying to measure general intelligence, why isn't anybody trying to teach corvids, octopi, macaques or dolphins a task that requires building towers of abstraction in their own mind, and then gives them harder and harder "levels"? I know at least octopi can use computer screens, and I know they enjoy hard puzzles that reward them with food, so it should be easy to teach them some computer puzzle game?

Say, we could build a four key keyboard that they can use, then teach them Sokoban, starting with extremely simple levels (walk up once to get a snack; walk up twice to get a snack; walk left twice; walk up twice, then down twice; walk up, then back down and right to get beneath the second crate, then up again...) and progressing towards actual Sokoban levels humans find interesting...

If they possess general intelligence this system could tell us a lot more about its limits than a series of experiments that each requires building a physical apparatus and spending a bunch of time perfecting it and then teaching it to the animals from zero?

Did I miss the answer when googling?

Is it that it's common knowledge among researchers that no animal possesses anywhere near enough intelligence to learn Sokoban (or 2048, or any non-real-time puzzle game with simple discrete controls, but I'm pretty sure Sokoban is a near optimal choice) so nobody even tries, nor bothers publishing it (or it's written in the basic textbooks that I didn't bother looking through)?

Do researchers in the field lack access to a technologist that could help them build something like Sokoban For Crows?

Or is it something else that I don't know I don't know?

Humans were effective in their intelligence and rule the world with it, no other animal has shown anything approaching something like that. You judge them by their results.