I have another reason to hate this. If we could give humans lidar to make their driving even better why shouldn't we?
Why should we deny an AI extra senses that can help it do its job better than we can?
Granted. On the other hand, electric signals can propagate across a chip several orders of magnitude faster than the chemical-electrical signals neurons use to communicate. So while our current path won't lead us to an artificial brain that works exactly like the human brain, it might still make one that's just as smart through pure brute force.
A biologist in 1902 could very reasonably have scoffed at the heavier-than-air flight enthusiasts who pointed at birds as a proof of concept. The biologist could point out that the complex, many-part motion of a bird's flapping wing was far beyond the crude mechanical processes inventors were trying to use to replicate it. And they'd be right. But in a much more important way, they'd be wrong.
I have no idea whether we're on the path to AGI or not, but I do think that "we're not building machines that work exactly like the brain does" is a poor counterargument.
It's not that artificial intelligence has to work exactly like human intelligence; my point is that the system that produces human intelligence is many orders of magnitude more complex than what passes for AI these days.
I think there's an idea out there that because deep learning allows computers to solve some problems that we thought were in the exclusive domain of humanity even a few years ago, that the refinement of these technologies and Moore's law will steadily close the gap between AI and human intelligence. I would venture to guess there are a lot of hard, novel problems left to solve before we get anywhere close.
edit:
It's also not the first time we've thought we had intelligence "figured out". In the middle of last century, there was a lot of hubris around the field of neuroscience as we started to understand the brain's topology, and could map specific functions to brain regions. The feeling at the time was that we would refine our map, and sooner or later once we figured out what all the parts did, we would have a total understanding of the human mind.
This paradigm led to some horrifically misguided practices. For instance the use of lobotomy to treat psychiatric disorders: if the brain is just a collection of functional regions, why not just cut out the bad bits right? Turns out it's not that simple.
You don't need to make a vehicle as complex as a cheetah for it to move as quickly as cheetah. You just strap a rocket to a box and you're there.
Granted a rough solution like that is not as good or as agile as a live cheetah in a lot of ways, but it depends on what you're optimizing for.
But if they're functionality equivalent, I'm cool with that.
Heck, it might turn out that humans are already just pattern recognition machines and nothing but. I'm cool with that too.
It's called "cargo cult science" and it's an important part of the AI hype train to keep funding coming.
The human brain is unimaginably complex. Even if we created a neural network on the order of the 100 trillion or so connections in the central nervous system we would still not even be close. Each one of those synapse is a complex, constantly adapting chemical computer which is sensitive to the interaction of dozens of neurotransmitters. Gradient descent is to neural adaptation as minecraft is to photorealism.
The idea that artificial intelligence will be achieved by adding a few layers to a "deep" neural network, or by throwing more data at it is laughable.