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Edward Lorenz, Father of Chaos Theory, Dies at 90
An anonymous reader writes "Professor Edward N. Lorenz, who discovered in 1961 that subtle changes in the initial conditions of a weather simulation program could cause very large differences in its results, died of cancer Wednesday at the age of 90. The contributions of the father of chaos theory, who coined the term 'the butterfly effect' and also discovered the Lorenz Attractor, are best summarized by the wording of the Kyoto Prize in 1991 which noted that his discovery of chaos theory 'profoundly influenced a wide range of basic sciences and brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind's view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton.'"
What you are saying is we won't get AI until 2030 because computers won't be fast enough to brute force it until then (and that's only if you believe Kurzweil). We can do it earlier if we could come up with some clever ideas, but I don't have any doubts that the first AI is going to be an exact neuron-for-neuron reconstruction of the brain.
"5. Artificial intelligence. Goedel Escher Bach had our hopes up. But nothing ever happened. It' too hard. People claim breakthoughs all the time, but wheres the beef ?"
You sound like you're a hook line and sinker victim of the AI effect. I'm no expert in the other areas you mention, but in terms of AI you truly don't seem to understand the subject at all. There are plenty of examples out there of fields where AI has been extremely successful and are used on a daily basis - data mining, medical diagnosis, spam filtering to name a few examples. I can only guess that you're living under some false expectation of strong AI anytime soon, whilst the possibilities of AI were overhyped for a long time, it's now also nearly been equally long accepted that we simply don't have the understanding or the computing power to produce strong AI quite just yet.