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Local minimum? In the next 10 years many deep learning applications will materialize: speech recognition will reach human level in production, autonomous trucks on highways, autonomous cars for consumers, AR, personal robot cleaners. The following 10 years will not fail us, too.

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Author here. Thanks for commenting, interesting point!

However, as you can see in the section "1960s", many similar comments were predicted 50 years ago. The point I address in this paper is that optimism is easy when things are going well.

This is a great example. Lots of people are saying today that we will have X in 10 years. But in 2006, no one was saying we will have X in 20 years.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm saying it's worth questing why you are so optimistic, and whether it's because we aren't looking at the big picture.

The difference from the 60's mis-predictions is that today we already have speech and visual object recognition systems working with 95% accuracy and we only need to get them to 99%. This gap will be closed by data collection and faster processors, no algorithmic leaps necessary.

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