Andrew's comment was very eye opening for me as well.

Is it possible we as humans have a well performing optimized search/compute algorithm in our brains that we have not been able to discover and recreate in machines yet ? In essence are we just bio-robots and procreation is just a method to bootstrap the next iteration of the bio-machine ?

If you look at the Boston Dynamics quad-legged robot, it "almost" feels like a real dog. CPU instead of Brain. Wires instead of Blood. Steel frame vs bones. The major difference being it doesn't have a large data set of experiences to behave like a real dog. Behavior/Emotions can be bootstrapped and eventually collected as experiences to query for future reactions.