[njharman]

"alive", life has deferent meaning (and defined requirements e.g self-reproduction) than "consciousness", "sentience" or "mind".

Unless you belief in a mystical soul component (I do not), there is nothing else "there" but machine. A very complex, biological machine. But there is no reason to believe that that a sufficiently powerful software/hardware can not replicate the functionality of that machine exactly. Then what possible difference could there be between the two duplicate machines?

But, we will have systems that exhibit a many aspects of "thought" and sentience long before we are able to code up homo sapien sapien.

[bitcointicker]

I'm not sure it's just about computational power. Currently we mainly deal with digital computers that process information in a very discrete way. This is a nice article with regards to the human brain being analogue or digital-

https://www.quora.com/Is-the-human-brain-analog-or-digital

The development of quantum computers could offer a huge leap forward with the development of AI.