If the internet were around when microwave ovens were invented, there would have been much the same outcry. Deep learning is excessively simple and elegant, I can explain it in person in under 5 minutes to anyone who has done high school algebra.
You only need to know that if you are studying the field. A good explanation of deep learning is no more surprising to the general populace than general relativity is (spacetime isn't actually the surface of a balloon).
That's not correct though, theres plenty of reasons why on an intuitive level neural networks should not work. Also, genetic algorithms are intuitively appealing but do not work well.
Because in high dimensional space there are partial saddle points, not local minima. Intuitively obvious, and shown theoretically in the last 12 months.
