It seems unlikely, and not especially relevant.

Human brains and bodies are made of parts, which we can study and come to understand. There is a lot we don’t understand about the brain, but that doesn’t mean the parts we don’t understand run on magic, and that humans could never build anything similar. It just means that brains are enormously complicated machines. The human brain has hundreds of trillions of synapses, and we have a long way to go in understanding all of the important high-level principles at work.

Intelligence, too, is made of pieces — algorithms and individual computations that our brains perform naturally, even though we don’t have a scientific understanding of how our own brains work.

Even if there were some aspect of biological reasoning that was very difficult to implement in machines, it wouldn’t follow that AI will never surpass humanity. AIs could just do the same kind of work in a different way, like how the AI Deep Blue found winning chess moves in a very different way than Garry Kasparov.^* What matters is not whether machines possess all the unique features of humans; what matters is whether machines become able to predict and steer the world.

The chapters to come will help shed more light on this point. In Chapter 2, we’ll cover how modern AIs are grown rather than crafted, and how the growing process will tend to make AIs very capable. In Chapter 3, we’ll then cover how attempts to make AIs more and more capable will tend to make AIs more and more driven toward achieving difficult goals. And in Chapter 4, we’ll discuss how those goals are unlikely to be goals that the developers intended, nor goals that the users asked for. This is all sufficient for AIs that steer the world into ruin, whether or not you consider AIs to have some vital spark, or consciousness, or whatever else you might imagine makes humans special.

See also, in the online resources to come:

• Chapter 2: “Isn’t AI ‘just math’?” and “Won’t AIs be cold and mechanical and logical or otherwise be missing some crucial spark?”
• Chapter 3: “Anthropomorphism and Mechanomorphism”
• Chapter 5: “Effectiveness, Consciousness, and AI Welfare”