[myrmidon]

IMO the big blindside of your argument is that you MUST either accept that some magic happens in human brains (=> which is HARD to reconciliate with a science-inspired world-view), OR that achieving human-level cognitive performance is a pure hardware/software optimization problem.

The thing is that GPT4 already approaches human level cognitive performance in some tasks, which means you need a strong argument for WHY full human-level performance would be out of reach of gradual improvements to the current approach.

On the other hand, a very strong argument could be made that the very first artificial neural networks had the absolutely right ideas and all the improvements over the last ~40 years were just the necessary scaling/tuning for actually approaching human performance levels...

This is also where I have to recommend V Braitenbergs "Vehicles: Experiments in synthetic psychology" (from 1984!) which aged remarkably well and shaped my personal outlook on the human mind more than anything else.