The brain is a highly inefficient system evolved arbitrarily and slowly over a long time. It does seem likely that we could, with much fewer computational resou

The brain is a highly inefficient system evolved arbitrarily and slowly over a long time. It does seem likely that we could, with much fewer computational resources, simulate the function of some of the tasks which brains are responsible for or "good at", such as image classification. However, "simulating the brain" in general is a much broader problem in scope. Consider: Can you even really truly say that you have "simulated the brain" without also including a physical body for this system, since a brain is inherently tied to a body and corporal existence in the world? It's not clear. It's likely the problem won't be computational power but figuring out how to extract or isolate only the bits of the system we are interested in from the rest. Consider the genome, for instance: we have had the human genome mapped since 2003 but the unfathomable complexity of the system as a whole makes it difficult (though not impossible) to apply for useful stuff. It's not just about computational power, it's also about defining computational models that can create human-competitive performance for certain tasks, or, in the case of AGI, for all tasks that might be expected of a human. That's the fiendishly tricky bit.