Still a lot to do before that I guess. But 500 years? What else in human history has taken that long to figure out? The age of technology is shorter than that.
Powered, heavier than air flight falls into that ball park. da Vinci was making doodles in the (late) 15th century, but this was only accomplished by the Wright brothers in the (early) 20th century.
Edit: After additional research, I discovered that recorded attempts at manned flight can be found as far back as the 11th[1] century! So it took roughly 700 years to figure out, if not longer as earlier attempts were likely not recorded.
Our current decomposition of mammalian intelligence seems somewhat weak in comparison: we've divided the mammal brain into regions, yes, but we still haven't made an accurate simulation at the electrochemical level of a functioning mammalian brain.
That's not to say nobody has or is trying, only that our simulations are more like approximations at present. They also don't have good simulations of astrocytes and glia.
Speaking as a neuroscience PhD ... no. Not remotely close, sorry.
I think maybe our artificial visual nets are too general, actually, in comparison to natural ones. It not only describes what it sees, but tries to analyze it too. Showing a picture of a dog results in "dog", rather than "big four-legged furry thing". Expecting a visual system to know that a chihuahua and a German shepherd is the same thing is maybe a case of grouping tasks that shouldn't be grouped.
In order to describe what the human visual system does we use words like "dog" -- and I would agree with you, "big four-legged furry mammal" might be better, but artificial visual systems work more at the level of "80% probability of dog," "2% probability of brick," "90% probability of chihuahua," and they don't really know that chihuahua must always imply dog.
In order to describe the function of the visual system, a fundamental change really must happen in the way the system's output is described. Using plain written words as output may work as a system but it is not an exact replica of a human visual system. It is more of a trained animal act: when you see dog-like images, press the button labelled "dog" (does the animal even comprehend what a dog is?)
In order to rethink the way we describe output, we will have to come up with a very precise description of the inside potentials and activations in mammalian brains. We are just barely creating tools to describe what an artificial neural net "is thinking." So I guess we're starting to look in that direction.
This is not a novel or unique application, literally all living things grow by using the rules encoded in DNA and environmental factors.
Consider the demo scene, where 64 kilobytes of code generates a fascinating video with deep complexity. You could not encode a 64k demo as a series bitmapped frames in 64k, or probably in 64 megabytes. But that doesn't mean that you can generate one by stuffing together a bunch of RGB pixels and hoping they self-organize.
Your hippocampus also deals with short term memory. HM was a famous patient that had his hippocampus removed, basically, and then lost all of his short term memory. Poof, gone forever.
In short, your brain has dedicated areas in it that only do certain things, it is NOT some FPGA that gets re-wired on the fly. Your intelligence is not dependent on the number of connections or neurons.
...said every failed AI researcher ever.
Calculus took a few thousand years to figure out.
Genuine question: what would be the value of blindly duplicating a brain without figuring out how it works (and as a consequence, without knowing how to change/improve how it works)? After all, we already know how to create human brains, and it doesn't involve tech at all :)
Also, blindly duplicating a human brain would raise serious ethical implications, especially if you intend to perform experiments on it. If it's clearly an appliance which only superficially resembles a human brain, I don't see the problem. If it was created blindly, and you're unsure how much it differs from a child's brain, would you cut it open, hook it to the internet or reset it at will?
I don't think these sort of experiments should be allowed.