"What's missing knowing how to do it (software inventions)".
Not really, the scope of the hardware plays an important role.
Consider: that you could perform the processing needed to play Half Life 2 on an abacus. But even if the abacus wielder followed the commands exactly and emulated the x86 instructions with paper and pencil, would anything actually emerge from the exercise that would be enlightening in anyway?
Probably not, since it would take a few thousand years (I'm handwaving here) to compute the contents of the first frame.
You're right, if the difference is that great. e.g. your handwaving of 1/50 sec to 4000 years, is about 50*10^11= 5,000,000,000,000 = a factor of 5 trillion (12 orders of magnitude).
I was thinking that 1 second's thought in a few months would be reasonable - but you are quite right, I don't have any real idea of the factor. Maybe that would be plausible if we found very efficient AI implementations, but the initial attempts of actually doing it at will undoubtedly be quite inefficient. And the slowness of feedback is a huge factor in coding, as well....
Not really, the scope of the hardware plays an important role. Consider: that you could perform the processing needed to play Half Life 2 on an abacus. But even if the abacus wielder followed the commands exactly and emulated the x86 instructions with paper and pencil, would anything actually emerge from the exercise that would be enlightening in anyway?
Probably not, since it would take a few thousand years (I'm handwaving here) to compute the contents of the first frame.