Absolutely. Want a computer that works like a brain? Obviously we need to know how a brain works first. We've certainly made huge strides compared to what we us

Absolutely. Want a computer that works like a brain? Obviously we need to know how a brain works first. We've certainly made huge strides compared to what we used to know, but as far as I'm aware we are still staggeringly far from a working model. Maybe we've increased our knowledge 2000% since the turn of the twentieth century or whatever, which sounds great and really is great. But to look at that from the other side--what if we're only 0.02% of the way to an adequate, functioning model of the human brain? We shouldn't be getting a big head just yet. These are the kind of problems which have profound amounts of complexity lurking in every unexpected pitfall. We are going to discover that it's a lot more of a tangle than we thought before it becomes simple again. I think most of us here know a thing or two about that sinking feeling when you're attacking a problem and discover that what seemed like a minor pothole is actually a wormhole leading into an entire universe full of waist-high bullshit with submerged landmines, but this problem will be in another class entirely. Figuring out the brain is a species-level problem and it's going to be VERY long and arduous. I also resent the article's assertion that "if an AI is a safer driver than a human, who cares if it's a black box?" Fallacious argument number one around self-driving cars. Hear it all the time, almost always from laymen. It's a nice way to sneak in the assumption that AI will be better than average human drivers any time soon. The way that metric has been measured has been very deceptive so far, and no AI has come close to matching human safety and robustness. Not in real life applications in the field at scale. Not even close. There's been shenanigans like discounting all driver interrupts, which by nature disguises any flaws of the AI and offloads that responsibility on a person as a sort of PR heat-sink. We don't give ourselves enough credit for how well we handle driving. Reality is chock full of exceptions, quirks, and legacy systems that aren't going to go away for many decades, and compared to the progress we've made on AI so far it's going to be many, many times more work for us in the future to deal with those niggling details. The devil's in there, he really is.