Google Does Some Very Good Groogle -- Years of Recognizing Cat Faces to Create One Barely Operational Eyeball -- While 800,000 Very Powerful Human Brains Live in African Refugee Camps

John Markoff of the New York Times reports that "Inside Google's secretive X laboratory, known for inventing self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses, a small group of researches began working several years ago on a simulation of the human brain."

They connected together 16,000 computer processors to review 10 million digital images found in YouTube videos.  The neural network, reports Markoff on the Times's front page, "taught itself to recognize cats."

He goes on to say that "the research is representative of a new generation of computer science....leading to significant advances in areas as diverse as machine vision and perception, speech recognition and language translation."

What's the point?  Do we not have enough human visual cortexes already?  Speakers and translators of languages? Where does this thrill of human mimesis in machines spring from?  Is it an art form?  Certainly not.  Some Pygmalion perversion?

A search on the New York Times website for the words "African Refugee Camp," meanwhile, produced a report by Lisa Friedman, from August 11, 2011, on how more than 184,000 refugees are streaming into Kenya, Ethiopia and other countries from Somalia, swelling the total number of refugees to more than 800,000.  What stops us from engaging these brains with the same amount of capital?

Why is so much energy being invested in this "new generation of computer science" when it just replicates what we already have?  Why artificial intelligence at all?  Is Markoff overly enamored with Google (he's a technology reporter), or perhaps infected with Groogle, to raise ethical questions about this sort of research?  How much money has been invested in this research?  How much money over the last 30 years?

Or is it just more entertaining -- more eyeball attracting -- to talk about cats?