I suppose I need context for that. If it's a current university professor expousing such things, yeah, I don't see how he could still believe that in the present day.
If it were university from 10+ years ago, ok, maybe I buy that he wasn't in a minority opinion at the time.
It was how people thought 10+ ago and the professor was certainly not alone in that line of thinking. The professor is retired now and I attended a lecture from him some months ago. He is now predicting a stop for the scaling around the 7nm. Making transistors that are smaller is claimed to be too difficult from physics point of view and chips should be able to do all we want from them...
My personal opinion is that as long that a chip can't run a game with
a) real-time movie quality graphics
b) opponents with human level intelligence
c) do that continuously for let's say one week when running of a battery
we will keep on scaling.
greets,
Staf.