You can only make claims about machines being better at "general" pattern recognition when we make progress on the issue that's stopped all Cognitivist General AI projects dead, which is that of situational awareness.
Arithmetic operations, spam detection and the task described in the article have a much smaller, and static, problem space than most human activities. You can demonstrably already knock up an automated-barrier style security guard. However, I'd argue that there does not exist an algorithm or appropriately weighted n-layer network that can handle all the ambiguity, countermeasures and ill-defined or contradictory situations that human security guards, or even just their object recognition capabilities, handle largely instinctively.
Do you think that a machine's situational awareness can not achieve or surpass the level of a human? If not, what is holding the machines back?
Why do you think that instinct works better to create more rational, consistent and correct predictions? Are 100 security guards better than a single security guard at dealing with ambiguities? Do you think an algorithm to detect fights, drug dealers, and pickpockets from street cams can not exist? What if a NN could detect these cases faster and flag this to a human security guard for action/no-action.
It needed training on 1TB of labeled images in the first place. Arguably it can be used to transfer that knowledge to other tasks with a much smaller amount of labeled samples but still requires supervision.
If the error rate gets low enough, a NN could start labeling pics.
Finally, recent work has shown that running a dictionary through an image search engine can yield high quality labeled images automatically.
Aside: Thank you for contributing to sklearn. Really feel like I am standing on the shoulders of giants when I use that library.
When computers first started to become faster than mathematicians this was really a breakthrough. The same is happening now with object and speech recognition.
The computer succesfully completes a task. That it is not how humans intuitively approach these same tasks is irrelevant for this accomplishment. What if the results were only half as good, but the system behaved more like humans, who does this satisfy?
The state-of-the-art is capable of detecting far more than 1000 objects, does not need labeled data, is robust to changes in light and does not care about the camera used. No preprocessing the data needed, features are automatically generated (preprocessing the target labels is a bit silly BTW).
So yes, in the very near future, algorithms will be better security guards than well... security guards.