Some object-recognition software today “is 90% accurate, you go to Facebook, there are just so many faces — [but there is] 90% accuracy” in identification. Still, even at 90% “your computer-vision colleagues would tell you ‘that’s dumb’…. But to get from 90% accuracy to 99% accuracy requires a lot more data” — exponentially more data. And then to get from 99% accuracy to 99.9% accuracy, guess what? That needs even more data…….“And that’s why I think self-driving cars, which involve taking actions based on data, are extremely hard [to perfect]…. “Yes, it’s a great concept, and yes, we’re making major strides, but … to solve it to the point that we feel absolutely comfortable — it will take a long time.”

“Here’s a simple fact. To fly a drone requires about 200 watts per kilo. So, if you want to lift a 75-kilo individual into the air, that’s a lot of power. Where are you going to get the batteries to do that?” The only power source with enough “power density” to lift such heavy payloads is fossil fuels. “You could get small jet turbines to power drones. But to have electric power and motors and batteries to power drones that can lift people in the air — I think this is a pipe dream.”

“You look at electric motors, it’s World War II technology. So, on the physical side we are not making the same progress we are on the information side. And guess what? In the U.S., 2% of all of electricity consumption is through data centers. If you really want that much more data, if you want to confront the hockey stick, you are going to burn a lot of power just getting the data centers to work. I think at some point it gets harder and harder and harder….”

“… A deep-learning algorithm that can do just speech recognition, which is translating what you are saying, has to be trained on millions of hours of data “and uses huge data farms,” Fung noted. And while a deep-learning network might have hundreds of thousands of neurons, the human brain has trillions. Humans, for the time being, are much more energy-efficient.
They can work “all day on a tiny slice of pizza,” she joked.

These are some very bright, highly motivated engineers we are quoting here. They are working on the cutting edge of AI and robotics. They are in agreement that the evolution the media is hyping is generations away. They are also in agreement that powering all of this is not going to work with batteries, as we know them today.