Google’s X Labs, responsible for dreaming up the company’s most
cutting-edge prototypes such as Project Glass, recently created
an artificial human brain of 16,000 processors. Naturally, they
exposed the brain to YouTube and a data set of 10 million
images, so it ended up identifying cats without prior knowledge
of even knowing what a cat was. The researchers attribute this
to part of the brain acting as a “cybernetic cousin” to the
visual cortex, constructing an image of cat subconsciously via
“grandmother neurons” that are activated when exposed to a
particular face over and over again. Overall, Google’s team
seems to think they can map out the entire visual cortex in less
than a decade. Let’s hope its sophistication isn’t misplaced.