Sorry to take things off-topic but

>Needless to say we will not be uploading consciousness anytime soon

I'd say that uploading consciousness is an entirely orthogonal problem to AI. Uploading a consciousness is all about scanning the brain and simulating it accurately. It doesn't involve any AI since the intelligence already exists. Conversely if you succeeded with uploading it wouldn't necessarily help with AI, since it would still be hard to see how the brain was working.

So I don't think progress in one field can tell you anything about the other.