You're telling me you were confused by what the author could possible mean with his nice and smooth y=f(x) and that you misunderstood him that really he was imp

You're telling me you were confused by what the author could possible mean with his nice and smooth y=f(x) and that you misunderstood him that really he was implying that GAI is just around the corner? The whole discussion here is one long list of "Gotcha!", missing the point and the context of the article completely. You think these non-CS people you evoke will be too dense to understand that the author is just approximating a simple function, and then will leverage their non-CS background and immediately conclude that ANN can 'solve' Cantor-dust, non-computability and the halting problem? That's a very specific set of background your non-CS people will have to have to fall for that. [Edit:] What do you think they'll make of "Multilayer feedforward networks are universal approximators"? ("This paper rigorously establishes that standard multilayer feedforward networks with as few as one hidden layer using arbitrary squashing functions are capable of approximating any Borel measurable function from one finite dimensional space to another to any desired degree of accuracy, provided sufficiently many hidden units are available. In this sense, multilayer feedforward networks are a class of universal approximators.")