> (That a human-equivalent or better machine for performing complex tasks in the real world is realizable with Turing-computable algorithms seems more or less g

> (That a human-equivalent or better machine for performing complex tasks in the real world is realizable with Turing-computable algorithms seems more or less guaranteed to me, unless there are physical processes happening in biological humans that are not) 'Guaranteed' sounds a little too strong to me. We just don't know yet. Also... > we are already having some success at using biologically-inspired techniques for classification I presume you are referring to CNNs, which in good-faith can only very _very_ loosely be characterized as biologically-inspired. People are constantly trying to draw comparisons (see the 'look the brain be like CNNs' papers that show up at NIPS every year) and I wish they would stop... certainly there are some superficial similarities but... it's more a case of convergent evolution than anything, there is no deep connection to be unraveled... I don't think there's any deep insight belying CNNs beyond 'wow building your data's symmetries into your model works great!'. Which is like a pretty obvious and fundamental thing imo...