I think work like this is very important. In the 1940s you could fill a football stadium with about 50 ENIAC computers and you wouldn't have 1/1000th the processing power of an Iphone. Your statement gives useful perspective in one direction, but exponential improvement cannot be ignored. There can't be any doubt that neuromorphic chips have a lot of wiggle room to explode in capability in the coming decades.
> have a lot of wiggle room to explode in capability in the coming decades.
Are you sure about that? CPU speeds have not improved in years. We appear to have hit a maximum, at least for now. (Of course I can't predict the future, but it's been years now and no change.)
Otherwise we would still be using (very cheap) Pentiums IV.
In a way, it's a testament to human ingenuity that CPUs have kept improving they way they have when the brute force way of increasing performance was not as viable as before.
Well we know as fact that a carefully designed system about 5cm wide and 5cm tall can have amazing capacity. Now precisely because CPU speeds are stagnant our architecture is we're way overdue exploring new paths towards this capacity. Although it's hard to tell if it's even achievable in silicon.
Personally I believe digital computation has only a niche applicability in the limit, the degrees of freedom from analog processing are just so much higher, even in the presence of noise.
