Do we have a terrific reservoir of computational ability though? The number are important because they seem to be about a million times too inefficient.

A human brain might take 36.8e15 computations per second [1] and does all this using about ~20 watts! That's pretty impressive at around 1.84e+15 ops / watt vs our current 6e+9 ops / watt [2] from silicon. We have to make about a million times more efficient processors to match the brains efficiency. My 4lb laptop takes what feels like forever to do a limited deep learning task given how inefficient it is.

If you gave just me the sort of computer needed, that alone would very likely not be sufficient. I just don't think we should draw too strong of a negative conclusions before we all have the necessary equipment to match the work of the brain.

But if myself and fellow computer users did have access to efficient powerful computers, we'd probably want to write algorithms that allowed us to make many attempts at the solution per second. I'd imagine writing a simulator to project many agents into where they are competing for resources and many of these simulations taking place concurrently. Something of a multiverse of simulation and optimization.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance_by_orders... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt