Who cares if we don't know how the brain works in detail, we still haven't built bird-like machines that flap, but we do have machines that soar through the sky faster and higher than birds. Same is happening with AI.
There's two main fields of thought - one that "general intelligence" is some unified, centralized system, maybe a "symbolic system"; another that "general intelligence" is merely the composition of a bunch of pieces that do certain stuff.
So maybe our advancement in the things you mentioned are making strides towards the latter. I think that's wrong, but it's possible. Even if it is the case, we're still not making strides in the pieces of that composed intelligence that answer questions like - what's bigger, a shoebox or a mountain?
In regards to your bird analogy: we don't have very popular bird machines, but we do know the principles that enable birds to fly. Similarly, we don't need to build brains, but anything we build that is comparably "intelligent" as a brain would be quite surprising if it didn't come from insight we have into the principles that enable general intelligence.
The consensus amongst competent people in AI is that of building practical systems.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
The first is the immediate future where computers can not act as independent, autonomous agents. This is the era we are in today, and have been for quite some time. Some of the concepts described in the article could be used to describe years ago, from a different perspective. Free online education? Has existed for over a decade, arguably pushing two decades. And so on.
In today's era it pays to use machines as tools of great leverage. It means not only that you get ahead of other humans, but you get way ahead of them. Your wealthy, in good health, and very happy.
The second is the era where "computers" become independent autonomous agents. In movies they always either enslave or exterminate humans. I would expect a more quiet extinction, not in existence but in relevance. In that case, what a columnist writes in the New York Times just doesn't matter, because it would have zero impact on anything that was doing decision making. Perhaps there is a biological transformation in this period as well, where genetically modified humans split off not in to another species but multiple species. In that respects, homo sapiens could become relics at the zoo.
Its all conjecture, but I think one thing here is a certainty -- that machines become both independent of humans and autonomous, able to act, buy, sell, and build things all on their own.