As far as I understand it, there's a standing hypothesis that cortical columns have a similar structure that is designed to learn arbitrary patterns via predict

As far as I understand it, there's a standing hypothesis that cortical columns have a similar structure that is designed to learn arbitrary patterns via predictive coding, and that a lot of human plasticity arises from the interaction and flexibility of these columns. Numenta has attempted to implement a system to this effect (see the wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory) for quite some time with not particularly much success. Personally I think the kinds of minds we create in silico will end up being very different, because the advantages and disadvantages of the medium are just very different; for example, having a much stronger central processor and much weaker distributed memory, along with specialized precise circuits in addition to probabilistic ones.