I don't agree with that. 1) How did the human brain come about - evolution. So you can get there with genetic programming. How much computer time do you need -

I don't agree with that. 1) How did the human brain come about - evolution. So you can get there with genetic programming. How much computer time do you need - maybe $100 billion, maybe $100 trillion, but theoretically it's doable. 2) What is the brain - conventional opinion is that it's a neural network - ie. if you spend enough money as -assemble a million neural network engineers or -create billions of data sets to train against simple learning algorithms you can probably replicate it's "interface" 3) You can also view a human, or at least a human speaking through email, as a database. If you had enough people working on cyc, let's say a million rather than the 20 or so it's usually had, you could get a lot closer, or exceed, human level performance. Imagine you a couple of professors and a handful of grad students. Would they be able to build a skyscraper within 50 years, and do so from scratch, without any prior knowledge of civil engineering, no access to construction labor, and only access to raw materials? Yet that is what AI has been about for 50 years - a handful of people attempt to build something much more complex than a skyscraper. It probably took many trillions of dollars and millions of workers to get to the point where skyscrapers could be built, and each one individually probably costs more than all the money ever spent on AI research.