Precisely this. If it has its own space it takes up, if its locomotion results in its own sensors ingesting data in a manner it decided to, it is more of an individual - one that is capable of selective learning.

Nope. Because even if you equip it with sensory subsystems which are way more sensitive than a regular humans', it's again built by humans, and required knowledge for building these things are still in collective knowledge of the humanity, and a human can use the same instruments to get the same data.

This is a kind of an oracle problem in computation, and people don't want to touch it much, because it's an existential problem.

Examples: ATLAS and ALICE detectors, gravitational wave detectors, James Webb Space Telescope, wide band satellites which does underground surveys, etc.

This is an argument for the logical impossibility of humans visiting the moon, or building the Internet. It's trivially falsified by simple observation, and the trick is figuring out the flaw.

This argument fails to account for the steady accumulation of factual knowledge across generations: a human born today is simply more complex than humans of the past because of our inherited knowledge. And so will AI born of future humans, and AI will itself continue accumulating and perpetuating knowledge.

No, it's not. None of the equipment and processes involved in the process of going to the Moon or building internet are more sophisticated than the processes involved evolving a human from scratch.

Yes, factual knowledge across generations accumulates, also being lost, too. However, even if it's not lost, the theory still holds true.

Nature is evolving, everything gets better over time. From bacterium to apes to humans. We evolve, accumulate knowledge and being able to build more sophisticated machinery, or tame more complex processes to build more sophisticated things. Even bacteria transfers memories across generations.

However, this doesn't remove the ceiling. Total human knowledge will always be larger and deeper than any A.I. we can create, because the upper limit is always what we can consciously manipulate and put into something. Your next car has the possibility to contain more technology, because we can build more complex factories to manufacture them. Yet, a car can't be more complex/sophisticated than its factory.

Consider a semiconductor fab. You can use the output of that fab to design/create better fab, but the process needs human intervention. Invention of new things are generally necessary. Better processes, optics, hardware, etc.

Another nice example is reprap machines. A reprap can print all plastic parts required for the machine. You need to get metal parts yourself, and assemble them. If you want to be able to print metal parts, machine gets more complicated. So a reprap which can build itself completely is at least sophisticated as the resulting reprap itself, but you need to hand assemble it again.

If you want an assembling reprap, now that thing becomes a factory. Again, the complexity of the product is at most the same as the building machine. You can create better factories which has more streamlined processes, but the gap widens again. The factory becomes more complex than the output.

As a human, you're the factory. Your upper limit is another human. You can create things more complex than a human by using multiple humans, but the creator ends up more complex than the creature itself.

You're moving up the ceiling, that's true, but everything we build is capped by our collective capacity. That's the truth.

A.I. is glorified search. It can wander in the box you create for it and show places you missed inside it, but can't show something outside that box.

Still trivially false. Turing machines and the lambda calculus can both enumerate all recursively enumerable functions. And infinity of complexity from simple formalism .