I'm still surprised that much of the talk around future "intelligence" is geared more towards creating it from scratch (difficult) rather than enhancing or augmenting what already exists (less difficult). Regardless of this, if creating intelligence out of silicon is where the research is heading, we would have to first prove that silicon is at least an equivalently suitable substrate for hosting a model of our carbon based brain as opposed to merely assuming that whatever brain model we create can exist on any substrate.

I think more progress will be made in the meantime towards enhancing existing intelligence as it will be more immediately accessible in many cases.