"When a computer beats on a drum it has been told by some human to beat a drum."

Well yeah, it seems likely that if a computer ever becomes really intelligent, it has been built by a human. So?

If it is an intelligent computer it will not need to be told what to do, it will motivate itself, but we may not even recognize its actions as motivation because the concepts are not clarified, we only know what motivates us, we can not begin to imagine how a sentient AI would be motivated, maybe it will tell us, maybe it won't, who know... That motivation does not necessarily have anything in common with a human motivation, there are plenty of alternatives. It might not want to beat a drum, even when told to.

For that to happen though we have a bunch of formidable hurdles to cross, and in spite of all our processing power and data storage capability we have not yet been able to simulate the intelligence of even an insect or a small mammal.

Whether an AI is built by humans or aliens or comes in to being through some freak coincidence is irrelevant.

As long as it takes a human with their intelligence to tell a computer what to do it has not achieved intelligence, merely the capability to follow instructions very precisely.

Are these human composers not "merely following a set of rules", namely quantum mechanics?

You're in line with Roger Penrose here, who suggests that in order to generate consciousness we will have to look at quantum effects rather than at molecular level effects.

This is possible, but not a certainty.

From what I understand, molecular level effects are the same as quantum effects looked at from a slightly higher level. My point was that, as far as we can tell, everything people do is the ultimate result of applying a fairly simple set of rules (the physical laws).

I don't think it is quite that simple. Quantum effects can screw up the apparent 'rules' of the macro world (atoms, molecules and upwards) subtle the closer you get to the lower levels of the macro world.

Physics as you know it ('classical physics') stops making sense at that level, things no longer have an apparent causal relationship.

What Roger Penrose argues in his book 'the emperors new mind' is that 'mind' springs from these effects.

He suspects that if we simply follow the classical physics rules that we will end up on a dead end and that it will take a full blown quantum simulation of a whole brain in order to simulate one with the emergent behaviour that is being sought.

Certainly. Setting aside whether or not quantum (instead of classical) physics is necessary, it certainly seems to be sufficient to explain everything that a person does. Given that, how can a person not be considered to "merely follow a set of rules"?