Not a remotely scientific speculation, but as far as the animal world goes you see much more "specialized processing" than "general purpose computing". I think

Not a remotely scientific speculation, but as far as the animal world goes you see much more "specialized processing" than "general purpose computing". I think this explains why we suck at general purpose computing but are remarkably good at things that general purpose computers have trouble doing. For example, your brain (and dog brains!) handle some tasks like catching a ball while running/jumping, perceiving depth, and responding to a name which are very computationally expensive. If you programmed a robot to do any of those things, you'd be multiplying matrices and doing FFT's everywhere. Somehow our brain does the same thing, but we don't have any means to observe the internal computations required to accomplish the tasks. I'd also argue that general purpose computing capacity is a very rare thing in the animal kingdom because in most cases only enough capacity is needed to glue the specialized parts together.