I have seen this argument being made frequently here recently--that the "AI" that we have produced is not "real" AI. This is understandable true in a way, since

I have seen this argument being made frequently here recently--that the "AI" that we have produced is not "real" AI. This is understandable true in a way, since after all, AIs cannot do many of the things that natural intelligences can do. And so there is this perceived disconnect between the weak AI that we have (rules, heuristics, belief networks, bayesian inference and friends) and the strong that we AI (magic?). But there is a similar disconnect that looms between the rudimentary intelligence of simple organisms and the more sophisticated intelligence higher mammals. Many researchers have noted this taken the insight that with a simple set of rules you can get complex behavior. This has lead to something of a revolution in ML, robotics and neuromorphic engineering. If this analogy holds, then it may be that the distance between weak and strong AI will be bridged in the same way that the distance between single celled organisms and primates appears to be bridged: by iteratively building complex systems on top of simpler building blocks. There simply won't be a secret sauce to be found, but each layer of complexity will allow for increasingly sophisticated behavior.