Optical fibers are thin, flexible strands of clear glass or plastic that can serve as a transmission medium capable of carrying up to several gigabits of information per second over short or long distances. In optical fibers the electric pulses are converted to light pulses and back to electric again. The human brain has a very limited ability to do more than one thing at one time. Humans can walk and chew gum at the same time but otherwise juggling ability is restricted. But even with electronic circuit switching times a million times faster than neurons, artificial neural models face severe size constraints.
Parallel processing is however, now a standard feature of modern computers.
Whatever the technological methods used, full human equivalency of the robot ANS is not far away. That is with the available technology as we know it today. If we are concerned with human equivalency only as it applies to work, to the ability to provide practical goods and services as required to maintain the modern lifestyle of typical North Americans then my expectation is that we have sufficient capability in the current generation of computers. In other words there is sufficient capability in computer hardware to handle all expert system programming for all of the work required and the biggest problem from the ANS perspective is the great amount of time required to write the programs. Perhaps that can be solved by writing a computer code-writing expert system program.