http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/boser-92.pdf
http://www.kip.uni-heidelberg.de/Veroeffentlichungen/downloa...
It would be interesting to see someone combine the principles of your work with analog implementations on a decent process node. Yours is kind of like a hybrid between properties of analog and digital cells. The real thing might be even more effective albeit harder to automate. There's some analog EDA but it's almost always custom work.
(Well, that took more space than I wanted. I downloaded one of your circuits papers for a gander.)
Cost mostly, If you can replicate a human-level intelligence for 10,000 (or 100,000) and have it work 24/7 with no time off and scale out to thousands of them then you'd have something absolutely terrifying in it's capability.
Image an AWS of a 1000 von-neumann level intelligences working co-operatively 24/7 on a problem.
The stuff of sci-fi right now but maybe one day, we know it's physically possible to build human level intelligences since we prove that the rest is 'just' engineering.
I would argue that this is not what they did. What they did was take something a human player does (study games to learn how to play). And then parallelized this to a level that a human can't match. Basically the equivalent of having one go player playing against an entire team of go players who are all experts.
The point I was making is that intelligent agents are built all the time by less intelligent agents. Humans will build more intellgent AI using exactly the same approach and these AI's can do the same.
Of couse building an AI via evolutionary training opens up a whole lot of control issues. Do we really want to be creating entities vastly more intelligent than ourselves when we have no real idea of their interests and when we occupy something that is valuble (e.g. matter and energy) to this entity?
I've always believed that humans do not have the ability to program things smarter than themself, because we do not understand our own intelligence, so we have no way to reproduce it.
At the time, I said the only alternative I can think of is make random permutations and pick the best one, and go from there. But I said this as a ridiculous suggestion that no one would actually do.
But then Google actually did exactly that with their Go machine!
So, that's what I think: The future of computing will be based on randomness and the job of the programmer will be to guide it, but not program it directly. (Can you imagine programming a webpage this way? Or writing a book this way?)