Yup. I share this line of reasoning and have based on it a worry that we can’t expect to recognize alien life if we encounter it in space. We are only good at recognizing mammals, and then decreasingly less good as we go farther and farther out. The only thing that usually tips us off is if it moves, but you mentioned plants… plants move, but only slowly. It doesn’t trigger that same reaction unless we can speed up a video. And yet we persist in looking for alien life. 😬

I suspect one major issue for AI though is that it’s a simulation, specifically of us, except it can never *be* us because we exist in an analog world. So I think AGI is dead in the water (unless we stop thinking we can simulate our own brains digitally). No simulation can ever truly capture reality.