In defence of AI researchers 1 is very, very hard and to the best of our knowledge there is not one way the brain works. The brain is a complex, cobbled together set of systems all using different ways of problem solving.
most AI researchers have never opened a textbook on cognitive psychology or neurobiology , or any of these 'soft' sciences.
how do you plan to build artificial intelligence with no model of intelligence, without learning about important experiments in learning and memory , it's the complete ignorance that drives me crazy.
Most of those experts aren't looking to solve general AI problems, they're looking for solutions to specific problems like basic image recognition. And you don't need a full human brain to do that, and you don't need to conform to the way humans and other biological systems do it. You're not aiming for full human intelligence, so you don't need to care too much about how humans learn.
That said, I find when trying to solve a problem with ML techniques, it's better to use someone who knows the problem domain really well than someone who only knows ML really well. Someone who really understands the problem they're trying to solve can encode that knowledge into their models when training the system. While I've seen people who really know ML but lack the specific domain knowledge labor for weeks, coming back to me with "discoveries" that are already well known.
Yes all of this is true. I do think studying how the brain works will provide very useful ideas of what might work in AI. At the very least it is a very interesting area to learn about.
