True, but we make progress figuring out how the brain works and eventually we will have a working virtual model of a brain. Image generation and recognition are improving very fast, but the lower bound on energy consumptions appears to be too high in comparison with the energy consumption of the brain. There are neuromorphic chip companies that develop different architectures that are more similar to brains than conventional architectures. They have much lower power consumption. I would prefer if we could get there using current fabs and architecture, but I am very skeptical so far.

We already know that brains are intelligent. We have no idea whether object recognition is a more efficient way. We don’t even know if it will lead to anything intelligent. Better to just build a scaled up version of the human brain and then let this AI figure out the next steps.

This is what I used to believe, too. But psychologists have shown that it is not the case. Think of small children: they act on their environment without recognizing objects and thereby learn what things are. Like opening/closing drawers, tearing paper, putting things in their mouth to find out if it is edible, etc.. And you surely noticed that if you see or think of something that you don’t know the function of, you can’t visualize it.

I know, I read that. But I said that what we have now isn’t just “not quite there, yet”. It’s a totally different thing from what it should be. Animals don’t do scene or object recognition (i.e. labelling). Animals simulate actions on the visual stimuli to infer what actions they can apply to their surroundings physically or virtually and then after that there might be some symbolic labelling. Like when you look at a door: you don’t primarily see a door but you infer a list of actions that are applicable to the geometric manifold that a door represents. You might act on the door by opening it or closing it without even thinking consciously about the door. When you focus on it you can classify it as a door through the set of applicable actions. I am sure you can relate. There is some very interesting educational content about this on youtube.

It’s not solved, modern CV is completely different and inferior from how animals perceive visually. Animals don’t do geometry->labelling, they do geometry->action.