Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
Note: Below are just my opinions.  I don&#x27;t think downvoting is justified.   I&#x27;m completely right and downvoters are wrong, but anyway this thread asks for what <i>we</i> think.<p>----------<p>My opinion:  (100.000000% guaranteed to be right in this case.)<p>It&#x27;s obvious that general artificial intelligence will be a reality and surpass human cognition in every way, because our brains are a couple of pounds of meat running on less than a hundred watts, using biochemical pathways: no light-speed switching, about a six orders of magnitude slower.  Meanwhile, our datacenters run in the gigahertz domain.  (There are, however, about a hundred billion neurons in the human brain.)<p>Some people think a computer will never be able to do general cognition.  They&#x27;re idiots.  It is like saying that nothing but a sack of meat will ever fly (i.e. that only a bird can, no human-made engine can) -- at a time when we have engines that are 1,000,000 times more powerful than birds&#x27; muscles.  (I mean at the time that Lord Kelvin famously stated that heavier-than-air flight is impossible.)<p>Any task of human cognition that the sack of meat in a skull can do, a digital algorithm will be able to do, because the former is just slow, slow analog meat.<p>Granted the emotional part is a point of difficulty but higher mental functions seem pretty unrelated to emotions.<p>AI is like when people were saying heavier than air flight is impossible.  Obviously it&#x27;s possible.  And it will rock and change the world.  (Anyone who doesn&#x27;t see it this way is stupid and wrong.  They&#x27;re just on the wrong side of history.  They have zero vision for things that are completely obvious.  It&#x27;s not even debatable.  It&#x27;s a sack of meat in a skull doing slow analog operations 24&#x2F;7 for 3 years before it can even read.  The bar is not as high as people think.)