Carver Mead, Silicon Valley's iconic physcist who has pioneered real world working electronics takes on the establishment views of Neils Bohr's Copenhagen description of QM and of the AI cult, citing the fruit fly conundrum that I've used for years...
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You write about the fruit fly as an embarrassment, because its sensory abilities so vastly outstrip the most powerful computer. What's going on?
MEAD:
The fly has an autonomous system that avoids being swatted. It has the ability to see and navigate and make decisions on millisecond time scales. We've never been able to make artificial vision systems that come within orders of magnitude of that, with all the computation we can throw at them.

It makes us look so stupid. And you don't get popular by saying that. But it's true. And the more we try, the more we realize it's a much harder problem than we thought. What is it about the way that the fly, or the cat, or the fish process their information that makes it so much more effective at computing these things? They use what seems like really slow, slimy computational material, and yet they perform miracles with tiny amounts of power, tiny amounts of space and in real time and very fast.

We don't know how even to formulate that problem, and we've been working on it since the dawn of computing. Every time we get another order of magnitude in computing capability, somebody says, “Now we've got enough!” But we haven't begun to get it. (Sorry there Slashdot geeke - phil)

As I have found out more about what's going on, I have become more in awe. I 'm amazed, for example, by the chemical complexity of neurological processes. They're not just digital or analog—they're chemical and physical, with dimensions that we do not understand at all.

Does biology have a problem analogous to the physics problem—lots of people barking up trees, and not many looking at the forest?

Every scientific discipline does. Our establishment rewards that kind of behavior. It's very, very hard to ask the deeper questions, because you won' t get tenure that way.

For years, artificial intelligence research has pursued an approach that comes down to: “If we can just write enough code, we can figure out how to make the thing do logic and how to solve problems . . .” It hasn't worked very well.

I think it just totally failed. Those AI systems can't see. They can't hear. They can't act. And they can't learn.
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He starts by attacking Neils Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, claiming that Einstein was right to be a skeptic. Mead asserts that physics has become moribund, constrained by 'nonsensical' word descriptions of QM. There's a better way, an intuitive (Einsteinian) way to understand QM. Although he's a physicist, the guy has been a most outstanding engineer, pioneering in microelectronics, building things that really work.

Read the whole thing. It's worth your time.