Actually, this may be very good news for Kurzweil. In his last book "How to Create a Mind", he lays out a theory centered around a "pattern-recognizer" unit that is repeated throughout the columns and regions of the neocortex. In his book, he assumed it to be made up of several neurons wired in a specific manner, but if each neuron can do some hierarchical processing of its own then the pattern-recognizer might be reducible to a single neuron.

I think it's actually quite promising. We're good at cell biology but poor at systems biology. If we can convert neuroscience to understanding what types of neurons exist and how they function, that is probably very tractable. In comparison, even measuring the connectome is an insane problem, and modeling trillions of neurons to reveal brain function seems intractable.