A more important question can we beat the cortex's generic learning algorithm. The answer today is: no. Not yet. But the evidence trend looks like we are narrowing down on a space of algorithms that are similar to the cortex (deep belief networks, hierarchical temporal etc etc).

Google learns about the internet by making a compressed bitwise identical digital copy of it. Machine intelligences will be able to learn that way too - and it is really not much like what goes on in brains. The way the brain makes reliable long-term memories is just a total mess.