"It's the modern day version of alchemy --- trying to create a fantastical result from a chemical reaction before it was understood that nuclear physics is the

"It's the modern day version of alchemy --- trying to create a fantastical result from a chemical reaction before it was understood that nuclear physics is the mechanism required. And even with this understanding, we have yet to succeed at turning lead into gold in any practical way." Well, sure. But then, we never observed nature turning lead to gold in any cheap way, whereas we do observe nature running complex intelligence on relatively cheap hardware (our brains). There's a pretty big difference between trying to do something never Nature did (alchemy), versus trying to replicate in a kinda-parallel kind of way something we've observed Nature doing (intelligence).