The joke is along the same lines as:
quote:
We shouldn't be looking for signs of intelligent life in space when we cannot even find signs of intelligent life here on earth!
Because we do not comprehend the structure we are attempting to model our efforts have fallen well short of desired but the logic and information processing and creative functions of the human brain have always been the stated goal.
Regarding trying to model AI after human brain activity, that would prove rather problematic. Just think of aviation and how all the early attempts to achieve mechanized flight by flapping the wings never succeeded. While birds' wings did provide us a model for the shape of aircraft wings, we use those wings in manners entirely different from those of the birds.
Computer hardware and human neural wetware are structured entirely differently and operate on entirely different principles. My thinking was shaped by
The Brains of Men and Machines (by Ernest W. Kent,
BYTE Books, 1981) which I recommend (if you can find a copy) even though I last read it in the mid-80's. The human brain is not only massively parallel, but also hierarchical as an intended action keeps getting broken down into sub-actions getting assigned to subnetworks (AKA "muscle memory") all the way down to the muscle-pair with its "hardwired" gating system that disables one muscle of that pair while the other muscle is contracting. Oh, and that "muscle memory" gets "programmed" by the human brain's ability to re-wire itself (ie, forming new connections between neurons, which is how stroke victims can relearn how to use their bodies) -- in
The Machine That Changed The World, the analogy to that was described as opening up a mainframe computer cabinet and watching it literally rewiring itself.
And computers function with sequential threads of execution. I was also trained by the US Air Force in electronic computer systems repair. Part of that training involved chasing sparks through the logic diagrams of an actual functioning CPU, the COMTRAN-10 trainer -- I still have my book of the logic diagrams. I have seen up close and personal how computers actually think. It is sequential, not parallel.
There are things that computers can do far better than humans, but there are things that a very young human can do which is beyond what computers can do, like a five-year-old's grasp of human language (in our Spanish/English extended family, the young kids were easily able to keep track of which grandparents used which language).
So then rather than trying to model how the human brain works, the task is to figure out how to get computers to perform the same kinds of tasks.