AI will be achieved -- over a period of decades and by brute force. At the end, I can't say whether you'll have machine consciousness or not, but you'll have something that is indistinguishable from it. And that's good enough.

What we call consciousness is probably very closely tied with having a physical body perceiving things it the outside world. So I think for a long time there will be differences between machine and man, but machines will eventually win out and become vastly superior to people. I just wouldn't count on it in your lifetime.

The really interesting question is: if we can quantify consciousness, what happens when we create something that's more aware and conscious than we are? Would we be considered sentient by a being that thinks a thousand times faster and in hundreds of thought-trains, lives for a million years, and can converse millions of ways simultaneously at bandwidths millions of times greater than speech?

We would be like insects to something like that, and it's not such a far-fetched idea or that far off.