Also interesting to consider how much "compute" has to be spent by humans are learning something like that. Like, do we need to see more examples if learning from pictures of cats and dogs than seeing them in person? How many more examples? What if we're seeing them all in sequence, or spread out across hours or days?

I've probably seen... at least a dozen pictures of aardvarks and anteaters and maybe even see one of them at the zoo but I don't think I could reliably remember which was which without a reminder.

If you see one picture of a zebra, fly to Africa, see a real zebra, you recognize it as a zebra. But zebras are really unmistakable.

If you see a picture of an oryx and a picture of a kudu, maybe you remember the shape of their horns and a picture is enough.

Enter waterbucks and steenboks. That starts to require a little more training.

Go all the way from mammals to insects. Bees and wasps and ants are still in the one picture is enough category. But what species of ants those on the wall of my house belong to?

I believe that ease of detection depends on how much things stand out on their own. Anyway, we do use a fundamentally different way of training than neural nets because we don't rebuild ourselves from scratch. However birds and planes fly in totally different ways but both fly. Their ways of flying are appropriate for different tasks, reach a branch or carry people to Africa to look at zebras.