In Jewish folklore, a golem was an animated being that was crafted from inanimate clay.  In modern Hebrew the word golem denotes “fool”, “silly”, “clueless”, and “dumb”.  Many people would agree that these are all apt descriptions of an electronic computer, of the sort which would form the “brain” of any robot with pretensions to imitating a human being. 
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In some ways computers do resemble humans, but only those humans at the severe end of the spectrum of disabilities known as autism, who also possess abnormally highly developed skills in specialist fields such as calendar calculation.  Yet although the resemblance has been remarked upon, it is actually quite superficial; even the most impaired person with autism has accomplishments that no computer or robot can approach. 
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To begin at the most basic level, all humans can ingest comparatively simple raw materials and convert them, via an astonishing and still poorly understood alchemy, into the growing cells of a developing organism.  Each one of our body cells is itself a tiny miracle of activity, maintaining its existence against the forces of chaos which constantly threaten to break it down into a formless, high-entropy mass; and at the same time it contributes a multitude of benefits to the organism of which it is a part, often communicating with its neighbours both near and far. 
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As if that were not enough, most of our cells are also obliged regularly to reproduce themselves, and in doing this, to copy without mistakes strands of their genetic material: and remember that the DNA in one single cell, if stretched out, would reach almost six feet in length.  It is as though a man were to walk from the Eiffel Tower to Everest on a tightrope, whilst doing his laundry and ironing, composing a collection of sonnets, making love to a succession of women (and delivering their babies), and manually replicating (and spellchecking) a portable filing cabinet containing the entire contents of the Oxford English Dictionary. 
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When it comes to the higher level processes of the central nervous system, the picture becomes even more complex.  The basic units of the human brain - cells known as neurons - use electrical impulses to communicate with each other across connections which may number ten thousand for a single neuron.  But there is a further complication.  There are tiny gaps between the endpoints of the “wires” that join the neurons together, and the signal is carried across these gaps by a bewildering variety of chemical transmitters.  And the neurons are capable of changing both themselves and the strength of their myriad interconnections with other neurons.  Our brains comprise a system in which physics and chemistry combine to produce something fundamentally different not only from any artificial computer which we can currently construct, but also qualitatively distinct from anything which we can foresee ever being able to construct. 
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Little wonder that Professor Greenfield in such books as “The human brain: a guided tour” and “The private life of the brain” has concluded that the aim by some proponents of AI of simulating the processes of the human mind on a computer is simply absurd.
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But it may be that her logic, though seemingly impregnable, is not completely watertight.  A subsequent article will explore a possible fallacy in this and other arguments purporting to prove that machines can, in principle, never in the future have capabilities that we would recognise as being at all comparable with those of the human mind.