> Why spend billions of dollars on armies ... The vast majority of AI research (over all time) has not been seriously intended or expected to arrive at a gener

> Why spend billions of dollars on armies ... The vast majority of AI research (over all time) has not been seriously intended or expected to arrive at a general intelligence. Sure there are some true believers there in some sort of handwavy construction argument ("and then a miracle occurs") and there have been serious research attempts to understand intelligence, of limited scope an resources. But to be clear, whether this wave or previous ones, the money washes in and the army of PhD's happens when there is a sniff of practical, usable algorithmic results from machine learning. It's not the same thing. Parallel application of even relatively stupid algorithms targeted at the right tasks will rapidly outproduce any reasonable number of organic intelligences of the type you describe :)