Yes, I did say continuing down the current path was necessary. From the languages to the libraries, today's tools allow us to work miracles. As Go has shown with CSP, sometimes these initial failures are just ahead of their time. Neuromorphic computing and neuroscience have come a long ways since the last AI winter.

The hierarchical model in Hinton's DNNs is a promising approach. My biggest concern is that all of the examples I've seen are built with perceptrons, whose simplicity makes them easy to model but share almost nothing in common with their biological counterparts.