A few years ago I read about a guy who did a bunch of behavioral experiments with house flies. His assessment: "In some ways they're incredibly smart, but in other ways they're incredibly stupid."
I've always looked forward to advancement in the study of insect neurology. I heard the challenge back in the sixties," Let's see them build a gnat." In the nineties, I used to look at the on-line site, Atlas of the Fly Brain, but it seems to have fallen into disuse.
There's been work in insect vision involving the "optical flow" concept that has yielded results, but nothing to really crack open the mystery of the insect brain. Where and when will the breakthrough come?
They have to work on something that will generate income in the meantime. What I mean is, they can’t spend 60 years replicating a cockroach brain with transistors. They have to go in baby steps and at each step of the way they must figure out a way to package the incremental progress into a useful product for sale to the public at a profit.
So I think their only way forward is to try to FOOL us. They will continue to make software that APPROXIMATES intelligence, or replicates it in some very narrow but useful(or at least entertaining) fashion. Maybe some day, they will become so good at fooling us, that they will accidentally discover how to create true intelligence.
I expect the first forms of success will come from more sophisticated phone answering software. Once it’s perfected beyond a certain point, they could start replacing people in all kinds of jobs. fast food drive thrus. Checkout lanes at all kinds of retail stores. gas stations. restaurants. etc.
That’s exactly backwards from the way mother nature appears to have done it. Human thought and human language would seem to be the pinnacle of mother natures(or god’s) creation. While vision(or at least light perception) and navigation would seem to be a much earlier creation.