Liah Greenfeld and Mark Simes have long worked together, integrating the perspectives of two very different disciplinary traditions: cultural history/historical sociology and human neuroscience. The combination of their areas of expertise in the empirical investigation of mental disorders, which severely affect intelligence---among other things---has led them to certain conclusions that may throw a special light on the question of this symposium: Will computers outcompete us all?

The Priesthood of the Singularity posits a fast approaching prospect of machines overtaking human abilities (Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near, Viking Press, 2006) on the basis of the exponential rate of electronic integration---memory and processing power. In fact, they directly correlate the growth of computing technology with that of machine intelligence as if the two were connected in some simple-to-understand and predictable way. Here we present a different view based upon the fundamentals of intelligence and a more likely relationship. We conclude that machine intelligence is growing in a logarithmic (or at best linear fashion) rather than the assumed exponential rate.