Critical thinking seems to be a lost art these days, making the marketing department’s job a lot easier than it used to be. A couple of modern miracles are a lot less than meets the marketeers’ eyes:
Artificial Intelligence
It takes only a few hours to teach a 16-year-old human to drive more or less safely. That’s because the human is intelligent. It is taking many years to develop self-driving cars because they have no intelligence. Every possible situation has to be individually programmed. There is no such thing (yet) as artificial intelligence. What does exist and provides the first baby step is machine learning, where neural nets can be trained to recognize pictures, sounds, speech, etc. Yes, this gives some pretty impressive capabilities, but it is purely mechanical, not intelligent. Programming of every case is required to provide actions in response to the recognition. A new paradigm is required for actual AI, probably one that involves abstraction, generalization and reasoning.
Quantum Computing
Today’s quantum computers bear little resemblance to the Von Neumann digital computers that we use. Quantum computers are like the early analog computers, where a set of circuit elements are connected to model a specific problem. Inputs can then be run through the resultant circuit to get a result. While the internal state of a quantum superposition can contain complex information, it cannot be extracted to our classical world as other than a one or a zero. A result cannot contain more bits than the number of qubits supported. While they are not without applications, a new paradigm for quantum computation is needed before they can be applied to general computing needs.
Financial Reality 