Dreaming (if that’s what we’re going to call it) actually does go on in parallel in many mammals and birds. Dolphins (for example) couldn’t ever truly sleep or they’d drown. So they sleep with one hemisphere at a time — half of their brain sleeps while the other half handles swimming, surfacing, breathing and so forth. It’s also been found that in a row of birds perching on a branch or a telephone cable, the birds on the ends of the row sleep with only the side of the brain that controls vision and hearing nearest to the other birds. The side that has to continue to watch for predators stays awake!

Clearly there are advantages to doing that — but the cost is that you’re working on only half the processing power for twice the amount of time that you’d need if you slept as humans do.

But yeah — after something like 40 years of AI research, the answer has always felt like it was always 10 years away — and no matter what new techniques were learned, the new problems they raised always pushed the estimated completion date further out of reach.

Suddenly, it feels like it’s 5 years away — and that’s *huge*!

I don’t know what will happen when we get our first General-Intelligence machine — but I don’t think “The Singularity” is the inevitable (or even particularly likely) outcome.