We don't have to produce intelligence artificially. We can just copy an existing one. If sub-synaptic connectome mapping and neural emulation can be made precise enough to accurately emulate the functioning of an entire human brain on a substrate that operates at several million times the speed of our natural biological wetware, we can quickly instantiate a population of human intelligence replicas that can each experience a lifetime of human cognition in an afternoon. I bet they would have the time and gumption to figure out how intelligence works. Given their ability to reconfigure their substrate, such intelligence would most likely transcend anything we're capable of understanding in a very short time. Those of us marooned in meat-time would then hope to become the treasured bonsai of these recursive, exponentially expanding intelligences. All it takes is full-brain MRI resolution down to, oh,
100 nm and the ability to accurately
emulate the function of interconnected cortical neurons.