It is not a few hundred insect brain something easy to emulate? How can you say that this brain has conscious and the emulated one not?
There is something called Moravec's paradox -stuff which is hard for smart people to do, say, playing chess, is reasonably easy for computers to do. Stuff like controlling musculatures and involving perception and mobility are really hard for computers to do (as the autonomous vehicle people are finding out).
I dunno if bug brains will be conscious, but they'll be able to do things easier than an intel chip.
One aspect of consciousness that I think we will have a hard time nailing down is the nature of our perception of time and how it aids computation and awareness.
Von Neumann machines follow predictable cycles, information follows predictable paths at predictable speeds.
Human brains interpret a wealth of signals simultaneously, with various delays between each signal, yet our perception is that all of these signals are being processed at the same time.
You see a ball drop close by and hear a loud slam exactly at the moment it hits the ground. But sound and vibration travel slower than light, both inside and outside your organs, and it takes different amounts of time to process them. We're talking on the order of several milliseconds. But our brain is able to warp our perception of time, which we still experience as linear, in such a way that things happening at different times appear to happen simultaneously. In fact, this phenomenon holds true for up to a ~20-40ms difference in signal timing before your brain stops trying to compensate for it. Eventually the ball is so far away that the timing difference between the audio and visual signal are too great to handle.
Another example is if I were to slap you across the legs. You would likely hear the slap and experience the sensation of pain at the exact same time, despite the fact that transmission of information through your pain receptors and CNS up to your brain is magnitudes slower than transmission of a signal from your ears to your cortex. Your brain warped your perception of time, effectively "rewinding the clock", so that you could experience both at the same time.
This intelligent muxing, sampling and holding of signals is tantamount to our ability to rapidly react to various situations. I also believe, and this is just conjecture, that our brains form maps which keep track of which kind of signals which should be experienced together, and tries to make them synchronized, running simulations which adjust its timing, similar to how your motor neurons simulate outcomes and compare them to the real outcome to adjust their electrical potential.
Until we begin developing systems which track things like this, with better distribution of computation and intelligent synchronization of state, we will be very far off from "consciousness" in a form that is intelligible and tangible to the one experiencing it.