[stuartbman]

Really disappointing to see a whole host of inaccuracies in this article, even beyond the artistic license you'd expect for the New Yorker. My own area of knowledge is in neuroscience so I'd focus on this.

For instance, while its somewhat correct that nerve signals are binary, insofar as they are all-or-nothing, and yet activity is highly analogue, with specific groups of neurons firing together in pre-programmed bursts & rhythms. This has been one of the challenges in producing BCIs

[dr_dshiv]

The analog nature of neural processing is frustratingly nonanalogous to digital computing. I’d really like to see more oscillatory computing systems built, like the von Neumann harmonic injector or the parametron. Using oscillators like central pattern generators is more common in robotics but there are much more powerful oscillatory computers that have simply never been built. That’s frustrating only because I think we’d learn a lot more about the way oscillations are used for computation in the brain.

[achillesheels]

I'm curious why you think it is non-analogous to digital computing? I published a manuscript which diagrams the necessity for the applications of electrical engineering scientific theory to electromagnetic brain reflexes which ought to be equivalent to electronic feedback control orders which become digital, i.e. operations which are principally numerically caused.

If you're curious to read the proposition of cellular life evolving electronics please see it posted in the /r/dsp:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DSP/comments/m06n31/dsp_theory_appl...