[sdenton4]

Well, it's your right to be a pessimist... I tend to think that the current hardware specialized for fast, parallelized linear algebra is at least as good as the wheels available at the start of the industrial revolution, though. We have learning algorithms that can match human/animal performance in a wide - but still constrained - set of tasks, which previous non-learned algorithms hadn't been able to crack. It's a start!

At some point you have to strike rocks to make fire, because the butane lighter hasn't been invented yet. You make do with what's available, and progressively get better at it. I tend to think that we're a couple-few perspective shifts away from getting it 'right,' and that the hardware side likely barely matters. But, I'm an optimist.