> Storing zeroes and ones deterministically on pieces of silicon with crammed together transistors and doing computations by what are basically logical gates is kind of limiting and inefficient.
And yet it is less limiting and more efficient than pretty much all analog computing devices we have built. I don't think the hardware is the issue anymore, I suspect that with the right models and training we can have thinking machines.
Jeff Hawkins' team of researchers and the people behind NuPIC and Numenta.org, at least, given how it was explained to me, believe that the human brain does compute digitally (ie the analog values don't matter, the presence or absence of the signals do). Geoff Hinton also appears to believe that the biological neural signals are interpreted in a binary way.
I could have misinterpreted their work, though, as I'm far from an expert, but that's what it sounded like to me.
And yet it is less limiting and more efficient than pretty much all analog computing devices we have built. I don't think the hardware is the issue anymore, I suspect that with the right models and training we can have thinking machines.