Automatic identification would also provide a way to index pictures people download from digital cameras onto their computers, without having to go through and caption each one by hand. And ultimately it could lead to true machine vision, which could someday allow robots to make sense of the data coming from their cameras and figure out where they are.
"The amount of information you need to identify most images is about 32 by 32." By contrast, even the small "thumbnail" images shown in a Google search are typically 100 by 100.