For much more discussion, see http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/brain-emulation-roadmap-report.pdf http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/brain-emulation-roadmap-report.pdf My take is

For much more discussion, see http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/brain-emulation-roadmap-report.pdf http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/brain-emulation-roadmap-report.pdf My take is that it's a lot of R&D work, and it's not clear which approach will get to a human level first nor which is safer. The emulation approach seems lower variance to me than an intelligence-from-scratch approach, even though there's tons of variance there too. We're just looking at a very uncertain future.