Image recognition requires AI. It used to be believed that it was simple. A famous AI researcher in the 50's once sent a bunch of grad students to solve it over the summer. They then started to realize just how complex and impossible the task was.

60 years later, we have finally made general purpose learning algorithms, vaguely inspired by the brain, which are just powerful enough to do it. And because they are general purpose, they can also do many other things as well. Everything from speech recognition, to translating sentences, or even controlling robots. Image recognition is just one of many benchmarks that can be used to measure progress.

Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1425/

Thanks to that, I found http://xkcd.com/1428/. That is genius.

I do find it inspiring. I studied neural networks at CMU and at Toronto. But if you look at the false positives that these CNN architectures generate, you'll have to agree that there is no "intelligence" present.

Image processing appears pretty central to human thought hence phrases like 'throw some light on the problem' and 'get the full picture', if you see what I mean.

Not really. One could be deaf or blind from birth, yet fully intelligent. It's more a matter of getting sensory from the world into the brain. That sensory may be visual, auditory, touch, etc. The brain is very plastic in this manner.

The processing of that non-visual input will still be performed by the visual cortex.

It certainly won't be in sighted individuals, and I doubt it can be adapted as you suggest in blind people. The visual cortex is quite specialized, and performs quite low-level image processing, e.g. detection of edges and corners, as well as movement. It does not do any object recognition. That's done elsewhere. For example, the fusiform gyrus is involved in facial recognition.

A good introduction to how the visual cortex works can be found in Eye, Brain, And Vision: http://hubel.med.harvard.edu/book/bcontex.htm

For example echolocation (in humans, not bats) is done in visual cortex[1]. Visual cortex shows activity during dreams and imagination. Blind people do use their visual cortex.

[1] Sorry, don't have a cite, but there are a lot of results on Google talking about it: https://archive.is/iDE27

This doesn't surprise me. They are using their visual cortex to process sensory data (auditory images) which substitute for sight.

I see what you did there.

AI now stands for Analyzing Images

I see a number of meaningful advances in computing technologies last year. But the term "AI breakthroughs" is getting meaningless these days.