You and I don’t see anything like pixels; our vision system pulls out relatively high level features like parallel lines, motion etc and starts working with that in addition to other optical data, muscle feedback on your lens shape etc. This is why many animals, including humans, freeze when frightened or when they perceive a risk: stationary objects are simply harder for most animals to pick out. The theory is (or was — I don’t know what they are doing today) is that you can see things interesting to humans and reason about them in ways interesting to humans.

Not part of that company: there are some wild but interesting theories related to this kind of thing. We pretty clearly have face-finding hardware (though not in the early visual system I presume). Do animals have this? Cats and dogs look at human faces.

I have read a theory that reading may hijack some subsystem originally used for identifying tracks (footprints).

It does appear that recognizing 2D pictures is learnt, not innate, while 1990s/2000 ML went the other way.

Some anthropomorphically-inspired design could yield systems that are more comprehensible and more useful. I wouldn't make a fetish of it (cars don't run faster than a human does) but machines should be better adapted to humans rather than the other way around (e.g. cars need special places to move around in so can only help humans when that is possible).