Neural networks have become so associated with machine learning that sometimes us computer scientists forget the origin of the name. The silicon neural networks we work with were inspired by the biological neural networks in our very own brains.
And while we may have made remarkable strides towards matching the ability of the computational engines in our skulls, we still have a long way to go: as Mitchel Waldrop describes in this Nature article, the brain “can carry out computations that challenge the world’s largest supercomputers […] in a package that is smaller than a shoebox, consumes less power than a household light bulb, and contains nothing remotely like a central processor”