Imagine you are looking at a photograph of somebody’s face. When you first see the photo, a lot of things happen in your brain: first, you recognise that it is a human face. Next, you might recognise that it is male or female, young or old, black or white, etc. You will also have a quick decision from your brain about whether you recognise the face, though sometimes the recognition requires deeper thinking depending on how often you have been exposed to this particular face (the experience of recognising a person but not knowing straight away from where).
All of this happens pretty much instantly, and computers are already capable of doing all of this too, at almost the same speed. For example, Facebook can not only identify faces, but can also tell you who the face belongs to, if said person is also on Facebook. Google has technology that can identify the race, age and other characteristics of a person based just on a photo of their face. We have come a long way since the 1950s.