Answer 1

Ask me more and I could ramble for a whole week, no stopping.

Short version: I think we’ll eventually get there, but not because machines will get spontaneously conscious, but rather because we won’t be able to easily distinguish between artificial intelligence and natural-but-enhanced intelligence. At some point the distinction won’t matter anymore and we won’t even ask where the intelligence comes from.

If you’re interested in this point of view, I highly suggest Ray Kurzweil’s “The Age of Spiritual Machines” 📓.

But, assuming we’d had infinite processing power right now, could we create something that’d be intelligent? I’d say yes, but we don’t have a proper ruler to measure that. Here I expand a little bit more on if we’d be able to detect when something exceeded human intelligence.