That's not the criticism he's making. He's saying to get to a functional adult brain you must have a few cells that work together, then a fetus brain, then a ba

That's not the criticism he's making. He's saying to get to a functional adult brain you must have a few cells that work together, then a fetus brain, then a baby brain, then an infant brain, then a toddler brain, etc all the way to an adult brain and all the care and learning needed in those stages to make it all work. You need the morphology and structures that happen in nature to get the structures and functionality needed to properly simulate a brain. We simply don't know about enough about learning, development, brains, and consciousness to just plug into a simulated adult brain and make it all work. We can only follow the path nature has laid out. I'm sure you can skip some parts like fetal stages, but we develop language at a very specific range of ages using specific techniques. We can't skip the language acquisition stage and then expect our simulated brain to magically know language. We can't skip the angry "me" stage of a toddler and expect the mind to have self-assertiveness. We can't skip the sexual and social awakening stage of teenhood and expect the mind to understand complex social concepts and sexuality, etc, etc. The only scenario I can imagine out of this problem is a per neuron copy of a working brain on the cellular level. I imagine this isn't, or won't ever be, in the cards for practical reasons. Or if you could someone divine the algorithms that create consciousness, assuming this is even possible on a transistor based machine, then that would also be a work-around. Right now we can't do either, so following nature's approach is the probably the sanest way forward. I wouldnt be surprised if the first AI ends up being more a biological 'computer' than anything having to do with x86 instruction sets and transistors, but that's just a guess on my part.