It's always interesting and amusing to read these sorts of articles. This has been a recurring dream and topic of conversation since well before I wrote my first program in 1975. It's easy to understand why. We've built these super fast number crunchers and added thick layers of abstraction that let us do useful things like encoding videos and tweeting. These things seem magically elevated above and beyond the simple operations from which they are assembled, and it's tempting to think we can continue piling up abstractions until we get to "intelligence."

I suspect, though, that the fundamental metaphors of human intelligence, whatever they are, far transcend "processing" the way our number crunching machines work now. That's why analogies to the way we interact with others ("Why can't I just tell the machine what I want?") fall woefully short of providing any insight into how we might program computers in the future. As long as the computers we are programming are processors of the same sort we program now, they will remain far, far too simple to ever understand what we want and act on our desires. To the extent they get part of the way to that ideal it can only be by relying on deeper and deeper layers of software, which at some point has to be written in the old-fashioned way. If that remains true then it would probably be dangerous to allow ourselves to get too far removed from the way things really work. We already know how painful it can be to end up relying on stuff nobody understands any more to provide critical functions.