Comment by andreyk

To be fair, this whole Deep Learning renaissance was made possible and kicked off only after decades of research in multi layer neural nets (going back to the 80s) by Hinton, Lecun, etc. They stuck to their chosen method despite it not having great empirical results (the research community shunned NNs in the 90s for SVNs cause they worked better), because they believed it should and will work - and it did, eventually. So a similar argument for 'basic research' could be made for neuromorphic computing.