Via a Tyler Cowen tweet, Robert Fortner writes,

The accuracy of computer speech recognition flat-lined in 2001, before reaching human levels.

Raw computer power is not enough to solve complex problems. That is why predicting that we will have brain emulation when we have as many logic gates in a computer as neurons in a human brain is silly. Five years ago, I noticed a pattern in the over-optimism of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions.

Generally speaking, the more open-ended the problem and the more adaptive that the machine needs to be to provide a solution, the less far along we are in arriving at a technological solution.