For all the reasons you listed, if we’re going to crack the problem of strong AI in the next century, we’re not going to be doing it by simulating the brain at

For all the reasons you listed, if we’re going to crack the problem of strong AI in the next century, we’re not going to be doing it by simulating the brain at the atomic or molecular level. However the lower level simulations are important because we still don’t have deep understanding of how neurons work. An overwhelming amount of neuroscience research data points to the neocortex reusing the same functional unit composed of 100's-1000's of neurons called a cortical column. For example one patient was able to regain her balance by rerouting the signal from her vestibular system to her tongue. So the cortical column is the layer of abstraction we should be shooting for. Hopefully we'll move away from the 1950’s style perceptron, whose mathematical simplicity has attracted researchers but has been a major distraction to AI as they share almost nothing in common with their biological counterparts. If we don’t want to see a 3rd AI winter, we need to move to more biologically inspired approaches.