I'd hesitate to even call them intricacies. Billions of years of evolution in biochemistry and multicellular organisms, half a billion years in nervous systems, and over 200 million years in mammalian brains have culminated with about 50 million years of evolution of the primate brain. For every human being that has ever lived, nature has run 10^X continuous brute force "simulations" to arrive at our present civilization, where X is a ridiculously high number that's impossible to even estimate.
Sure, our intelligence allows us to skip a lot of those processes just like it allowed us to escape our gravity well and explore our solar system, but the jump from CPU to brain is like the jump from moon landing to intergalactic travel. The discrete nature of digital electronics alone prevents them from matching neurons because of sampling, let alone their lack of architectural (i.e. neural) plasticity. It's like trying to weld with a q-tip.
Nature isn’t limited to intentional design tho, I’m not sure what advantage we have when you have a few 1000’s of people trying to progress technology over their life time vs about 7 billion iterations which are governed by natural selection and that is if you only account for a single species.
Also don’t forget that a single life can also produce multiple iterations of itself over its life span.
Designs are limited by what we understand and can imagine as well as other constraints, nature not so much.
Sure, our intelligence allows us to skip a lot of those processes just like it allowed us to escape our gravity well and explore our solar system, but the jump from CPU to brain is like the jump from moon landing to intergalactic travel. The discrete nature of digital electronics alone prevents them from matching neurons because of sampling, let alone their lack of architectural (i.e. neural) plasticity. It's like trying to weld with a q-tip.