I think your premise is incorrect, though I agree that the amount of hardware required is probably overstated. The flaw I see is that you are assuming that all neural functions map to silicon with the roughly the same efficiency. This is almost certainly not the case. Audio and visual processing are the same class of problem i.e. they are both very similar types of signal processing functionality, and I would therefore expect them to have roughly the same relative relationship to silicon in terms of processing efficiency. Something like language functionality, which does not appear to be terribly analogous to signal processing, may have a substantially different relative processing efficiency for better or worse. My intuition would be that signal processing type functionality is actually one of the least efficient processes in the brain with relation to its silicon counterpart, and would therefore stand to gain the most by mapping it into silicon. -James Rogers jamesr@best.com -------------------------------------------------------- On Fri, 2002-05-31 at 12:31, Mike & Donna Deering wrote: The experts have grossly over estimated the computational requirements for GAI. We have a way of calculating it precisely. Kurzweil says we have simulated the human auditory functions and we are very close to a complete simulation of the human visual function. And we have a good idea of the neuroanatomy of these systems. Simply take how much hardware does it take to simulate these functions, how much of the brain do these functions comprise, extrapolate how much hardware it takes to simulate the whole brain.