[aabhay]

I did take a look at the article before writing my comment, and I disagree with its premise as well as conclusion. The human mind has a variety of specialized functions. Our ocular cortex does a sort of convolution on a 2D field with three color and one alpha ‘sensors’ (cones and rods). If specialization were less powerful than generality, why isn’t our brain one giant lobe with no diversity in neuron topography?

The idea that specialization is not as powerful as computation fails the most basic test of a proactive, rather than retroactive, theory. Can you make proactive claims about what works in any given domain? Is the solution to take the hungriest algorithm and apply it? What about feature engineering, cleaning, parameter tuning, analysis, etc.? Is the most power hungry solution still the most effective? In my opinion, part of the reason humans aren’t just giant computation blobs is that we thrive on constraints (physical, sexual, emotional).