HAL scared me enough.

i just want to live long enough to see the day when all of mankind joins together to fight a war against the robots we created.

i am sceptical that it is possible to create intelligence. seems like you have to evolve it, and that takes time.

time is a skewed concept.... Given a well built simulator (think awesome computer game), you could in theory "evolve" a ai in a compressed timespace...
From my current point of view its quite possible.
Given that it will be beneficial for an organism to be able to make a model of the world around it in order to make predicitions and thus make decisions towards goal, it seems that common goals would lead to an emmergent behavior of percieved conciousness.... ie... long term goals of food, sleep, shelter, and survival through genectially coded counter mechanisms as in pain, hunger, fear, an overall pattern could evolve in this compressed time that could be indestiguishable from biological intelligence....