"The next few years" is probably optimistic (or pessimistic if you think they're going to kill us all). The computational and storage potential of the human brain is still something scientists don't fully understand, but it certainly doesn't seem to be something that can be accurately expressed in terms of petaflops and exabytes. In particular, the capacity for abstract thought in the absence of external stimulus is a mystery, and that's the sort of thing an artificial intelligence would need to do in order to be considered remotely "alive".
Funny, I just watched a documentary on Wilson the other day. Hearing them explain how hard it is for a computer to understand the little nuances of speech was interesting. They said at one point humans who were on Jeopardy usually answered the questions correctly 90–95% of the time. Wilson was getting 10–15% correct. I guess it's something I would have figured a computer would kill a person at. But obviously there is much more involved.
I would love to work on projects like that. I think working on something cutting edge or something really hard would be very rewarding. You wouldn't have any constraints as long as you could find a way to get the computer to cooperate.
And something that I think about a lot is binary. How a computer only speaks in on or off and is able to do what it does is flat out unbelievable.
I was watching Dara O Brian's Science Club last night, and episode of the brain. Some clever scientist type people put a detector on the surface of a woman's brain and used it to detect neurons firing when she spoke/thought of speaking. They were very on/off signals like binary.
Actually it was someone who was paralysed imagining moving their hand that had the neuron detector. The other person saying ooohhh and aaahhhh had a different sensor to measure rain waves or something.
I think it's important not to make assumptions about what's actually being discovered in this kind of experiment.
It's a little like trying to work out what 'going to work' is and coming up with the observation that we see a shadow being moved from point a to point b every time. Interesting, true, and you don't get one without the other (dark days aside), but I could go off on all sorts of wasted investigations if I assumed that it was a useful observation in answering the question.
bastard by name