Brain-like computer chips are a totally wild concept. And they might just be the future of AI

Scientists can use nanomaterials to mimic the human brain's structure. Despite its name, artificial intelligence isn't all that smart -- at least when compared to human brains. A.I.'s are excellent number crunchers and pattern finders, but when it comes to actual human-level cognition and problem-solving, they've still got a ways to go. But that distance could be quickly shortening, thanks to the emergence of a next-generation of A.I. called neuromorphic computing. Instead of teaching A.I.'s rigid logic gates and processors to learn through strict rules and datasets, neuromorphic computing takes a more biological approach to learning and designs computing systems that mimic a human brain's architecture of neurons and synapses.