[fnl]

"Never" is a strong prediction. But yes, ANNs have nothing in common with BNNs (biological ... :-)) at all, other than taking them as a very rough abstraction for teaching the basic intuition of the chained up tensor transformations.

The hard thing is to predict the when, or even if, of AI. If it will happen, it will be a sudden, light-switch like moment. I don't think AI can happen gradually. At least the first artificially scentient entity will be a moment much like a singularity some love to predict in the near future...

But as to when that moment will occur, or even if, I think we have no real data that shows we are any closer today than say 10 or 30 years ago. Pattern matching, no matter how complex, isn't "all there is" to intelligence and conciseness.

EDIT: OP changed his reply from "will never happen" to "hasn't happened yet" while I was replying, explaining why mine might read a bit strange now... :-)

[somenewacc]

> If it will happen, it will be a sudden, light-switch like moment. I don't think AI can happen gradually.

But our own intelligence happened gradually.

[mcbits]

Human intelligence at the individual level evolved pretty gradually, but there hasn't been enough time for biology to explain our advancement in the last 10,000 years or 500 years. Culture and social organization are the essential nurturing factors there.

Every human genius would be out foraging for roots, perhaps reinventing the wheel or the lever, if it grew up without the benefit and influence of a society that makes greater achievement possible. Modern science and high technology that we attribute to human intelligence are really the products of a superintelligence (not to be conflated with consciousness) acting through us as appendages.

I think it's entirely possible (even likely) that all of the components of a new computational superintelligence already exist, but they are still "hunting and gathering" in the halls of academia or the stock market or biotech or defense...