The Navy revealed the embryo of an electronic computer today that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence. [...] Later Perceptrons will be able to recognize people and call out their names and instantly translate speech in one language to speech and writing in another language.
- The New York Times in 1958 after a press conference with Rosenblatt. ("New Navy Device Learns By Doing; Psychologist Shows Embryo of Computer Designed to Read and Grow Wiser")
We now have walking, talking, object recognizing, writing, self-replicating, face-detecting, text-to-speech converting, and translating computers. All at a scale and accuracy surpassing us mere mortals. We do not know enough about "being conscious of our existence" to measure this in other animals and digital life forms. Perhaps "humans predicting future predictive capability of machines" is fundamentally flawed. Perhaps the above article drew an unnecessary amount of ire and criticism. Probably a fuzzy combination of the two.