He is upset at monoculture in research.

Remember that throughout the eighties/nineties ANN classifier performance was as underwhelming as other approaches or even worse at many tasks. Now it reached a local optimum and all other approaches are being discarded.

When you search only in the immediately most promising direction you sure find local maxima - and you may miss the global one. Unless you can make guarantees about the search space which surely you can't make about life, the universe and everything.