Human-Level Intelligence or Animal-Like Abilities?

"The vision systems of the eagle and the snake outperform everything that we can make in the laboratory, but snakes and eagles cannot build an eyeglass or a telescope or a microscope." —Judea Pearl^a

The recent successes of neural networks in applications like speech recognition, vision, and autonomous navigation has led to great excitement by members of the artificial intelligence (AI) community, as well as by the general public. Over a relatively short time, by the science clock, we managed to automate some tasks that have defied us for decades, using one of the more classical techniques due to AI research.