Minor correction here. You are correct about hardware being an issue, but the magnitude is much greater. You have a lot more than "thousands" of inputs. In the hand alone you have ~40,000+ tactile corpuscles (sensing regions). And that's just one mode. The eye has ~7 million cones and 80 million rods. There is processing and quantization performed by each of those cells and each of the additional cells those signal, throughout the entire sensory-brain system. The amount of data the human brain processes is many orders of magnitude greater than even our largest exascale computers. We are at least 3 decades from AGI if we need equivalent data processing as the human brain, and that's optimistic.
Like you mention, each individual neuron or synapse includes fully parallel processing capability. With signals conveyed by dozens of different molecules. Each neuron (~86 billion) holds state information in addition to processing. The same is true for each synapse (~600 quadrillion). That is how many ~10 Hz "cores" the human computational system has.
The hubris of the AI community is laughable considering the biological complexity of the human body and brain. If we need anywhere close to the same processing capability, there is no doubt we are multiple massive hardware advances away from AGI.
I agree with this up till saying we must be very far from AGI. I don't think we're close, but the scale of human inputs doesn't tell us anything about it. A useful AGI need not be capable of human level cognition, and human level cognition need not require the entire human biological or nervous systems - we're a product of millions of years of undirected random evolution, optimized to run a fleshy body and survive African plains predators. This whole thing we do of thinking and science and engineering is a quirk that made us very adaptable, but how much of what we are is required to implement it isn't clear (i.e. a human minus a hand can still understand advanced mathematics, there are blind programmers etc.)
Sure, but there are animals with much larger brains on Earth which have - we believe - a reasonably high level of cognition but have not achieved the technological and engineering feats which we have (i.e. dolphins, whales, elephants as naive examples based on brain mass and complexity).
Conversely you have birds - with much smaller brains - which also don't achieve those things but display advanced language skills, have apparent societal structure and despite our inability to understand it seem to have enough language to communicate advanced concepts.
You are absolutely correct. There are multiple algorithmic advances required in addition to hardware advances.
Parrots have hundreds of millions to a few billion neurons, which are just as much parallel-local state-proceasing units as the ones in the mammalian brain. We haven't done a great job of simulating a ~300 neuron c. elegans worm. Not that simulation is required for equivalent intelligence. I'm just saying these analog machines are much much more complex and powerful than the average AI aficionado gives credit. So complex that we are nowhere near AGI.
Like you mention, each individual neuron or synapse includes fully parallel processing capability. With signals conveyed by dozens of different molecules. Each neuron (~86 billion) holds state information in addition to processing. The same is true for each synapse (~600 quadrillion). That is how many ~10 Hz "cores" the human computational system has.
The hubris of the AI community is laughable considering the biological complexity of the human body and brain. If we need anywhere close to the same processing capability, there is no doubt we are multiple massive hardware advances away from AGI.