As I understand it, birds don't need to flap their wings to fly. Many birds can glide for long distances, say. They flap their wings to give themselves a push and get off the ground, etc, but not to stay aloft. In other words, airplanes do work on the same principles as birds do, they just employ them in a different manner.

Similarly, the whole idea that we can reproduce human intelligence using computers is based on an understanding of human intelligence as computation, and of the brain as a computational device [1]. Without this assumption, AI would have been very difficult to justify, and I do mean AI in all its forms, from its beginnings with the Dartmouth conference and what can be called "McCarthy's project", to modern days.

For example, for most of the history of AI, the main thrust of research was on propositional and first order logic as models of human reasoning. The current wave of deep learning itself is predicated on the idea that the human brain is a kind of computer and so it can be simulated by a digital computer. The connectionists are just a little more literal in that sense, than most other AI people.

But, yes, absolutely, wa are totally trying to make artificial minds that behave just like human minds, that "flap their glia like brains" or whatever. The only problem is that we don't actually have a very good idea how human brains work- let alone the minds they produce.

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[1] These are the main ideas behind cognitive science. See the wikipedia article: