Why the singularity is hard and won't be happening on schedule

I am not a brain scientist myself. I think that knowing strength of connection as well as plasticity are both very important. In fact, I think that plasticity considerations are one of the main things that Penrose correctly addresses in The Emperor's New MInd. However, from a graph-theoretic and machine learning point of view, this does not strike me as intractable. Just yesterday I witnessed some new results in the connectomics project in which they can essentially (95+% accuracy on training data sets) reconstruct the wiring diagram of non-trivial volumes of a mouse brain (10^(-7) m^3) in less than 5 minutes using Gibbs sampling methods.

The current problem is getting enough resolution to make the accuracy much higher than 95%. No engineer involved with the project believes this will be difficult to accomplish in a ~10 year time span. The next detail will be imaging at that resolution in a video of a functioning brain and they are already discussing ways to achieve this too. I agree there are some real difficulties in understanding neurotransmitter functionality. But nothing suggests it will be prohibitively difficult for engineering in the next 25 years... at least that's my opinion if we are to just brute force directly store detailed videos of neural activities at the 250 nm resolution level. If we make any breakthrough whatsoever about abstraction and principles in neural physics that allow us to discard some of that brute force data resolution, it will only make the problem easier and less expensive.

"Of course he would argue for X, therefore you shouldn't listen to his arguments for X" is a fully general counterargument. The fact that he is making arguments for X shouldn't cause much updating; the content of those arguments may very well. I realize that's not precisely the point you are making.

If the arguments are already known to us, then they shouldn't cause any updating if we are perfect logicians. However, it should be noted that this wasn't a general post on the likelihood of the singularity, but a response to the other article (the bird metaphor was theirs, not Hanson's). He was pointing out how already known arguments de-fang the arguments presented: if Hanson's objections are correct, then if you were doing much updating because of the new arguments presented by Paul Allen, you should undo most of it.

Edited to add:

I should note that this is only applicable when the existing argument undermines the other argument, not when it simply overwhelms the new argument, or you get back to double-counting problems.

Hmm, I wonder if I pressed some hot button, given the silent disapproval.

From your link:

But concepts are not useful or useless of themselves. Only usages are correct or incorrect.

In this particular case they are going into some detail to explain what they mean.

The "logistic growth curve" charge, as voiced by John Wilkins:

First of all it occurs to me that people who expect the Singularity to occur simply do not get the logistic growth curve.