Alt Text: an image of Agent Smith from The Matrix with the following text superimposed, “1999 was described as being the peak of human civilization in ‘The Matrix’ and I laughed because that obviously wouldn’t age well and then the next 25 years happened and I realized that yeah maybe the machines had a point.”
The distinction is that it’s not ‘something to do with neurons’, it’s ‘neurons firing and signalling each other’.
Like, we know the exact mechanism by which thinking happens, we just don’t know the precise wiring pattern necessary to recreate the way that we think in particular.
And previously, we couldn’t effectively simulate that mechanism with computer chips, now we can.