RE: "Deep Learning" AI is Total BS
Great points, AI isn't as advanced as deep learning implies. The technology is new, driverless cars have less accidents than humans per mile, have been driving for a 10th the time as humanity and will drastically improve.
Although AI can't yet adapt as quickly as we would want between different scenarios or paths, who says that a breakthrough isn't just around the corner in that field? A complicated AI running on a powerful computer could easily switch between different programs or AI settings and beat us at both basketball and football egames or other things.
And a camera lens autofocus? Compare the age of that technology to the billions of years of eveolution the human eye has undergone. I'd say after less than a couple generations the autofocus will soon catch up and exceed anything the human eye is remotely capable of soon. Such as having millions of focal points concurrently as magnitudes far beyond what our eyes are capable of.
But you're right, in its current form, AI isn't as deep as we are leading to believe.
An AI breakthrough will never be around the corner because no program can ever be smarter than the programmer. It can perform functions faster than humans, and it can "learn" within a predefined framework, but this is nowhere near human intelligence, which requires at least an element of introspection.
As far as cameras, they're bound by mechanical limitations. Even if we created a super-fast camera, the mechanical gears in the lens would experience friction, particularly focusing from far objects to close objects. But the human eye can accomplish this task at lightning speed, even from one extreme to the other.
Now, billions of years of evolution...how does nothing turn into something?
Why can't a program be smarter than a programmer? Students often outshine their teachers. I believe in the Singularity, where at some point in the next half century computes will surpass us in intelligence. Moore's law of increasingly better processors is holding true and breakthroughs are being made in quantum computing at least according to IBM, Microsoft and others.
As far as mechanical limitations are concerned, they will beat biological limitations. I agree the human body is remarkable, but robots are already stronger than us and more precise. Friction is overcome with lubricants. Also most human eyes fail and they are extremely fragile.
I am not going to argue about evolution.
Students outshining their teachers is an apples-to-oranges comparison (for instance, people are born with varying IQs). A program can't be smarter than a programmer because the program is entirely limited by what the programmer inputted. Consider the concept of generation loss, such as in audio replication.
Ultimately, why true AI can't exist points to the creation of the universe, which is why I suspect that you don't want to argue about evolution...you actually don't even want to say one thing about it. By creating our replacements with essentially a new, digital "species," we become our own gods, which is preposterous for the reason cited above. But even if such a thing were possible, it would further prove that the created (ie. humans) need a creator (ie. God), or what the establishment calls biogenesis.