From personal experience making the same comparisons during undergrad, I think it just comes down to the availability of conceptual models. If the brain does X, there's a good chance that a computer does something that looks like X, or that X could be recreated through steps Y & Z, etc.

Once I started to realize just how much of the brain is inscrutable, because it is a machine operating on chemicals instead of strict electrical processing, I became a lot more reluctant to draw those comparisons