There's another requirement: The finished cognitive computer should be as small as a the brain of a small mammal and use as little power as a 100-watt light bulb. It's a major challenge. But it's what our brains do every day.
"Value systems or reward systems are important aspects," he said. "Learning is crucial because it needs to learn from experience just like we do."
It won't be an easy task, says Tononi, a veteran of earlier efforts to create cognitive computers. Even the brains of the smallest mammals are quite impressive when you consider what tasks they perform with a relatively small volume and energy input.

"I would be happy to create a mouse brain," Tononi says. "A mouse brain is quite remarkable. And from there, it shouldn't be too hard to scale up to a rat brain, and then a cat or monkey brain."

We have already the learning programms, it is spam filters. Some of them rather dumb, but some (Google's and Apple's, IMHO) are out of competition.