I'd wager against that incremental model. I'd say that strong artificial intelligence is far more likely to happen via bottom-up modeling of the existing human

I'd wager against that incremental model. I'd say that strong artificial intelligence is far more likely to happen via bottom-up modeling of the existing human brain as a starting point. The computational capacity for reductionist simulations that will exist probably 20 years from now, and as computational capacity increases those simulations start to become emulations. I don't expect to see massive gains over that time in the other way of doing it. Once you have crude human brain models, a lot of very unethical things will start to happen in the course of further development. (e.g. countless deaths of intelligent beings if you're in the continuity identity boat, and probably a lot of unavoidable pain and suffering regardless of your take on identity). That seems hard to prevent given the enormous advantages that will accrue as a result; there is a strong incentive for people to adopt the pattern identity point of view so as to justify what they are going to do with mind copies in the course of development. The important point is that once you have human brain models, from there the path to many different forms of strong artificial intelligence is just a matter of iterating those models. This seems far more likely to produce results than constructing new forms of intelligence progressively and de novo.