> The "we could just simulate the whole brain down to the quarks" argument is an argument for the existence of AI. Nobody seriously suggests that it's the pract

> The "we could just simulate the whole brain down to the quarks" argument is an argument for the existence of AI. Nobody seriously suggests that it's the practical path forward to achieving it. Yes, but you have to consider that funding will normally go to research programs that can show steady progress - even if it'll be 10 million times more work (of the same kind) to have a potentially useful result. Here's the discoverer of the electron, J. J. Thomson, explaining it far better than I can: “If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible results being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate, different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: you want this kind of research, but if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it.”