It appears that FaceBook’s AI Directory agrees with me on the implausibility of trying “to copy every detail that we know of about how neurons and synapses work, and then turn on a gigantic simulation of a large neural network inside a supercomputer, and hope that AI will emerge.”

“I’m going to get a lot of heat for this, but basically a big chunk of the Human Brain Project in Europe is based on the idea that we should build chips that reproduce the functioning of neurons as closely as possible, and then use them to build a gigantic computer, and somehow when we turn it on with some learning rule, AI will emerge. I think it’s nuts.

Now, what I just said is a caricature of the Human Brain Project, to be sure. And I don’t want to include in my criticism everyone who is involved in the project. A lot of participants are involved simply because it’s a very good source of funding that they can’t afford to pass up.”

Quotes from Yann LeCunn in Facebook’s AI Director on His Quest to Make Machines Smarter With Deep Learning in IEEE Spectrum.

Implicit somewhere in the assumption of AI spontaneously emerging from a big enough neural net is the idea that it must have happened that way in nature since evolution is presumed to be true.