I agree that AI is going to push us forward to places we've never even considered before (being a strong supporter of the Singularity myself), but I think focusing on AI is wrong. I think that, like most big things, strong AI will come by accident. Someone will be working on something orthogonal and they'll stumble upon the key to strong AI. Hopefully that'll happen sooner rather than later, as it's very important, I just don't think that sort of thing can be focused on in and of itself and succeed.