A computer can add to his knowledge base though.
This is pretty much were AI is going these days. Called depth learning or whatever. It's only the beginning and for now is used for very specific tasks like speech recognition, playing a game or analyzing images but eventually you'll have a computer able to do it all and obviously better than humans. No more strictly programmed answers just a knowledge base with algorithms to make a choice using this knowledge base. And of course the knowledge base can be updated by the AI itself based on his successes and failures. It requires a lot of processing power though. Just for one specific task it requires pretty much a super computer and also a truck load of money.
Deep learning - Wikipedia
Top 10 artificial intelligence (AI) technology trends for 2018
Machine Learning and AI trends for 2018: What to Expect?
AI vs. ML vs. DL | Skymind
There's only a small minority in AI research who actually understand the need to concentrate on consciousness rather than 'intelligence'. No matter the intricacies and complexity of the algorithms, those will remain glorified probability machines and calculators and will remain far from a singularity, far from self-awareness. Calculation is not intelligence. My calculator has me beat by a light year when it comes to calculus, but it has zero intelligence.
The whole problem lies in the fact that we are an emmergent biological species and our faculties, genes and behaviours have evolved slowly in relation with our environment (Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was partly vindicated by the science of epigenetics). Our consciousness has grown by feeling, by our senses, by this intimate relationship with all the cues that come into our minds through our senses.
Consciousness can't sprout into existence and evolve without this relationship. Every single one of our thoughts originates from our limbic system (A. Damasio), the seat of emotions, where all our attraction/aversion cues get stored. It is from sensing and feeling that our intelligence has evolved. The old diehard myth of cold calculation, and psychopaths being geniuses is a complete farce. Sure, childhood trauma of one or all varieties, physical and psychological trauma, or neglect, will indeed create bigger frontal cortices (executive functions) than the average (along with a bigger amygdala; violence & fear), but the highest yield for intelligence comes from maternal care (M.C. Diamond; F. Benes).
Creativity originates out of the use of all four major cortical regions (frontal cortex, temporal lobe, parietal lobe and occipital lobe). The facilitator, the sorta hub for all those regions to interact is the anterior cingulate cortex and the corpus callusom. The latter is the left/right bridge. The former deals with our most basic and central of our faculties; sociality. There is a growing focus on sociality as the key driver to intellectual growth, which fits in like a glove with all the neurobiology research around emotional and intellectual growth. They go hand-in-hand. One can inhibit or drive the other and vice versa (R. Sapolsky), but most of the time, they work in tandem.
Creativity, abstractions and metaphors all seem to stem from all the regions that are central to our sociality, especially language.
One last argument versus the prevailing concensus in AI research, and it's a big one:
In the animal kingdom, especially and almost exclusively among mammalians, the few rare races who display self-awareness (the rouge tests and other similar experiments) are also the ones with the highest empathic response and complexe sociality. Elephants, chimps & bonobos, cetacean and the corvid family.
There is no greater complex sociality than with the most intelligent of mammals, us.
You have to differentiate yourself from others and from your environment to be self-aware. That's why empathy and sociality are key, and why so much research is gonna be wasted with the wrong idea as the starting point.
High levels of problem solving and learning didn't start with tool use. It increased as our social minds increased. Theory of mind is where it all strated.
Without senses and sociality, all we'll have are more complex systems of control/capacities/automation, and the code lines will forever be limited to the boundaries of it's scope, like cobra commander said, but put differently.
I could go on, but i'll stop here, it's getting late.
