I think I tend to agree (and actually, the author does, as well), the interesting question is whether we've been underestimating the number of artificial "neuro

I think I tend to agree (and actually, the author does, as well), the interesting question is whether we've been underestimating the number of artificial "neurons" we'll need. If each biological neuron is actually essentially implementing an entire neural net internally, then we might be a lot further from achieving that amount of computation than we expected. We absolutely need to start doing what you're suggesting, and figuring out how to derive useful basic structures, represent them, and construct networks using those as the building blocks. My prediction is that's where the field will go over the next 5-10 years, a much deeper dive into how to specify connectivity and usefully control it than has been done so far (we're still using fully connected layers, for the most part, which we know is not a scalable approach as we go from thousands to millions of nodes).