[kwekly]

What you're describing sounds a lot like a statistically trained system.

"until we understand how that information is encoded in our own minds, getting a machine to truly understand it the same way will be elusive."

Here's a (fairly convincing imo) discussion as applied to language:

http://norvig.com/chomsky.html

Further, I think human emotions are pretty transparent -- e.g. why might people lust after high calorie foods?

The timeline is probably far shorter than you are describing here.