At best, decades away? That's some crazy hubris. It's not even imaginable how far away it is. I find it absurd that humans think they can achieve arguably the highest level of godliness in mere decades. This is almost as crazy as saying teleportation is less than a hundred years away. We can't make predictions about things we don't understand.
Edit: I'm getting some flak for not including the rest of the quote, but I would argue that it doesn't matter. The rest of the quote was "and probably not possible at all". Their conclusion makes no sense. How can something either be impossible or potentially very possible? This statement shows how little academia actually knows about neuroscience. And no, this is not comparable to opinions about the moon landing in the 50's. By the 1950s we already had a completely sufficient theoretical framework for achieving space flight. The same cannot be said about consciousness upload as of today.