Originally posted by: QED
"Vaporware Intelligence".
In my humble opinion, the kind of "intelligence" hinted at in the article will never be a reality for computers. Real intelligence is as much creativity as it is brain processing power. Almost all AI algorithms are brute-force methods, in which the computer searches thousands of solutions or situations a second instead of actually "thinking" or "comprehending". The term "artificial intelligence" is actually quite fitting, since the whole notion of a computer being intelligent is just an illusion. Like a bad magic trick, it appears real only to those who don't know any better.
Patience. No one ever would have thought that bacteria could lead to what we have today. Give it a few billion years, and those bacteria lead to intelligent life forms.
We can progress a bit faster than nature can. Give it time. The makers of the first calculators probably never thought that they'd see computers capable of performing billions of operations per second, and to have them in households, becoming disposable appliances.
Patience.

I think within 100 years, we'll have prototype sentient machines.
The only difference between an intelligent robot and an intelligent person is that one uses transistors (or eventually some kind of optical circuitry), and the other uses cells.