The hubris here isn't CS people making comparisons, it's assuming biological substrate matters. Your brain is doing computation with neurotransmitters instead of transistors. So what? The "chemicals not electricity" distinction is pure carbon chauvinism, like insisting hydraulic computers can't be compared to electronic ones because water isn't electricity. Evolution didn't discover some mystical process that imbues meat with special properties; it just hill-climbed to a solution using whatever materials were available. Brains work despite being kludges of evolutionary baggage, not because biology unlocked some deeper truth about intelligence.

Meanwhile, these systems translate languages, write code, play Go at superhuman levels, and pass medical licensing exams... all tasks you'd have sworn required "real understanding" a decade ago. At some point, look at the goddamn scoreboard. If you think there's something brains can do that these architectures fundamentally can't, name it specifically instead of gesturing vaguely at "inscrutability." The list of "things only biological brains can do" keeps shrinking, and your objection keeps sounding like "but my substrate is special!!1111"

> Your brain is doing computation with neurotransmitters instead of transistors.

This is an incredible simplification of the process and also just a small part of it. There is increasing evidence that quantum effects might play a part in the inner workings of the brain.

> Brains work despite being kludges of evolutionary baggage, not because biology unlocked some deeper truth about intelligence.

Now that is hubris.

This seems naively dismissive of arguments around substrates considering that playing "Go at superhuman levels" took 1MW of energy versus the 1-2 (or if you want to assume 100% of the brain was applied to the game, 20) watts consumed by the human brain.

> Your brain is doing computation with neurotransmitters instead of transistors

If it is, sure. But this isn't a given. We don't actually understand how the brain computes, as evidenced by our inability to simulate it.

> Evolution didn't discover some mystical process that imbues meat with special properties

Sure. But the complexity remains beyond our comprehension. Against the (nearly) binary action potential of a transmitter we have a multidimensional electrochemical system in the brain which isn't trivially reduced to code resembling anything we can currently execute on a transistor substrate.

> hese systems translate languages, write code, play Go at superhuman levels, and pass medical licensing exams... all tasks you'd have sworn required "real understanding" a decade ago

Straw man. Who said this? If anything, the symbolic linguists have been overpromising on this front since the 1980s.

Case in point.

There is no evidence that neurons have remotely the same computational mechanism as a transistor.

Memorizing billions of answers from the training set also isn't that impressive.