I agree with SRK. Creating a true artifical intelligence would cause problems. When a robot becomes sentient and starts asking about what his purpose in life is, this is pretty much a path to doom.
The human brain is a lot faster than a computer CPU, we just don't notice it. Imagine an operation like this. Let's sum up 2 numbers with 5 digits each. A computer does that in a nanosecond because the representation is already in a format that the computer can understand and process easily: electrical charge. When a human, though, gets a pen, a piece of paper and the task at hand written on paper, why does it take so long to sum up those two numbers? It's simple. There is an incredible vast amount of operations going on here. Your eyes perceive the information on the paper. The information gets transmitted to the brain where the image is being processed completely. As the brains knows how to read numbers represented graphically, it needs to decipher what is written on the paper which is a matter of miliseconds even if the handwriting is bad. How long do you think it takes a computer to "read" an image? In fact if we actually get so advanced with computers that we are able to develop a program that can "read", it will take a whole lot of time. Let's get back to the brain. What else does it do in the meantime? There are loads of other operations like breath control, heart control, monitoring everything in the body, releasing of stimulants and hormons, controlling eye movement to get more images for processing, etc. Now the actual summing up of the numbers is on an icredibly high level of processing an hence it is slower. It's the same when you sum up two numbers using a high-level scripting language and pure assembler or machine instructions. The representation of those numbers in our brains is still graphical and partial abstract. So we're actually doing summing up two images in a logical sense and not just summing up two electrical charges like a aritmentical-logical unit. Not just that, we imagine the look of the result before we actually write it down. We also think about quite a number of different things during that time what can "decrease the concentration". Let's say you're hungry. It will affect your ability to calculate so that you want to hurry it up and make a stupid mistake that way.
The reason for all this is they way our brain works. While a computer works in a serial way, processing instruction by instruction and has only 2 dimensional processing (conductors and semi-conductors on chips) while the human brain processes stuff parallely and in a 3-dimensional manner. Neurons are connected in all directions with other neurons and each neuron can work as a separate unit hence 3-dimensional and prallelel processing is possible. Also the redundancy creates a very error proof system. Imagine a neuron dies. So what? Who cares? There are billions of them, one doesn't make a difference. But what if just one processing unit in a CPU dies? Well, everything's down.
This pretty much shows that a decentralized system like a neuron network, where each part and each neuron has a special task that it is assigned to, is far more powerful than a CPU which processes everything. It's true that a computer CPU is much more capable and powerful than a single neuron, but a billion neurons will always beat one single CPU. Maybe even just 1000 neurons are enough to beat a normal CPU.
You think computers are smarter than humans? Think again!