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- From Probabililty Theory: The Logic of Science by E.T. Jaynes

Many people are fond of saying, "They will never make a machine to replace the human mind, it does many things which no machine could ever do." A beautiful answer to this was given by J. von Neumann in a talk on computers given in Princeton in 1948, which the writer was privileged to attend. In reply to the canonical question from the audience "But of course, a mere machine can't really think, can it?", he said: "You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you will tell me precisely what it is that a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that!"

Prior to today, I didn't think the following was possible. What does this have to do with econometrics? I was never that interested in maximum entropy estimation and I don't know much about it, but the following image is maximum entropy applied to image data. Now I'm interested.

Maximum Entropy Data Consultants, http://www.maxent.co.uk/

The following fact by way of Mario Juric:

While most people can see with a resolution of 1?€™, the image on our retina is blurred through a PSF of width as large as 5?€™ due to various effects (the largest being chromatic aberration).

And while we still struggle with finding optimal deconvolution algorithms, the brain happily performs the procedure on a 8500x5400 (43Mpix) image, a few times per second, ~17 hours a day, 365 days a year.
MacKay (2003)
Tidwell (1995), http://www.hitl.washington.edu/publications/tidwell/ch3.html