Funny how that happens. In 2006 I was taken a grad-level Intro to ML course. After the first (and only) lecture on neural nets, I asked the prof on recommendati

Funny how that happens. In 2006 I was taken a grad-level Intro to ML course. After the first (and only) lecture on neural nets, I asked the prof on recommendations for learning more - since I had mostly a cogsci background, I was pretty interested because of the "neural" part. The prof essentially said the same as yours (I don't blame him -- it was a common sentiment of the time). And of course, these days he's doing deep learning!