Dumb Computer!

I just read this prediction and feel a pressing need to share it with you all. A Mr Ray Kurzweil reckons that by 2029 machine intelligence will rival, if not exceed that of the human brain.

Now I realize that 2029 is still a fair way off, but for anyone who works with machine (or computer) vision that's going to seem a pretty far-fetched claim. I mean, when it comes to image processing and analysis P.C.s are really dumb. I dearly wish a vision system could actually understand what it's looking at, but right now we are just so far from that point. Computers are just machines that execute code. The modern dual core beast is not that different to the punched card reading behemoths of the '60s and '70s. It just runs the code the way it's programmer wrote it, and when it comes to images, all it can do is work on the matrix of grayscale values, and nothing more.

Now I will admit that I'm not at the forefront of computer science, so it may be that there are advances of which I'm unaware, so if I'm wrong please correct me. But in the meantime I have to say I think the day of the Terminator machine is still a very long way off.