Nice article with a lot of information. Honest question here: you make some strong claims, have you been involved in speech recognition research, or are you an informed outsider? It seems like the latter? Poking fun at AI optimists like Kurzweil is fun, but not insightful at this time. The field has taken a different direction since then and I'm not sure that people know where corpus based statistical methods are going to go. Again, honest question.