This bit was inspired by a discusssion with a friend of mine, a biologist. I'm no expert on this, but as far as I understood, we know very well how neurons connect together, what chemicals are exchanged inside the brain, which chemicals trigger which receptor, how certain firing patterns look like, which areas of the brain are active during certain activities (although roughly) - but we have not much of an idea how these connect to human behaviour. She talked about this example where some stimulant (I forgot which) actually chemically does more or less the same thing in the brain as alcohol - and yet the consequences on the behaviour are almost opposite. There is a huge gap between neuroscience and behavioural psychology. One of the problems in studying this is of course that you can't just go and implant electrodes or put chemicals in peoples' brains to see what they do when you give impulses - I think this has been done for mice, but humans are of course way more complex. Unfortunately, you also can't ask the mouse what it was feeling/experiencing during the experiment, so it's not as enlightening.
I can see how you would arrive at that conclusion, but it's the emergent nature of brain function that makes it very hard, maybe even impossible, to connect basic neural processes to behaviour. But there are many smaller leaps that provide a tremendous amount of knowledge on how the brain works when looking at interactions between scales: how specific cell groups are storing and replaying memories of their activity, for example, or how different visual processing areas interact to identify a shape as being in the foreground or background, or how visual and auditory processing areas collaborate to determine whose voice it is you hear out of the dozen people whose mouths are moving. Don't get me wrong, there is still a massive amount of unknown aspects of the human brain at every level of study, but the expectation that what we need to do is 'fill the gap' between basic neural processes and the sum total of human behaviour is completely unrealistic. It's like trying to model the daily traffic flow inside a country by looking at a model of a combustion engine. That's also why your example of psychoactive drugs makes them so difficult to study: we are observing their effect on the highest level when their mechanisms may involve changes at any number of levels, high or low, throughout the brain. Predicting those effects is like modeling traffic flow when all the red cars in the country have their speed reduced by 10%, and that's just keeping it simple.
My point being, while the brain is incredibly hard to study and not nearly completely explored, progress is constant and substantial, so I think it's not at all hard to imagine a fundamental breakthrough in the coming decades. Even now, the exact neural process that results in conscious perception has already been discovered.
The timeframe still seems a bit short to me, but I don't doubt that an intelligence somewhat similar to our own is in principle possible if you start with a species which is already almost there. Isn't it actually weird that noone seems to have tried that yet? I would have thought of apes as being the most promising (because they're closest to us, I guess), but you're right: One needs a species which reproduces faster. Also, I think that some species of bird fare better in many of these classic intelligence tests than apes do.
Actually, there is this one gorilla (Koko) that as been taught sign language and also to understand English (~2000 words apparently). According to Wikipedia, she's the only gorilla to ever have passed the mirror test for self-recognition. I read an article about her once; she can talk to humans in a limited way (say she wants to have food or water, which colour something is etc.) and has even lied to the scientists studying her - behaviour that has also been observed in chimpanzees and is generally taken to require quite a bit of intelligence. On the other hand, it is not entirely clear in how far Koko really understands sign language and uses it to communicate and how much she has just been trained to sign certain things in certain situations to receive treats. There might be some anthropomorphising going on.
It seems like a very simple thing to do, breeding intelligence, but in practice there's probably ethical concerns, it would be incredibly expensive and there may not be all that many practical applications. Let's say you create a parrot smart enough to do crosswords. What does that get you? Try explaining that on a grant application.
I'm not sure if it was the same primate but there's a widely cited example of one driving past a swan, which she had never seen before, and signing 'water bird'. The question is whether she was creating a new word to refer to a new thing or just saying what she saw: water and a bird. This problem plagues the whole field of behavioural science: an animal may
look like it is behaving in an unexpected, intelligent way but there could also be a very simple explanation.
No one has yet been able to formulate what consciousness really is.
Technically I just did, three posts ago. Now, how consciousness works, that's a different question.
The scary thing is that most AI research is probably done by the military, in order to improve their drone technology. If this AI one day becomes self-conscious, we may be in for a lot of trouble 
*sigh* What did I just say about AI "becoming self-conscious"? That doesn't happen.
It was late, I was tired, and I was a tad overwhelmed by the huge walls of text making up nearly every post in this thread, especially since much of it was simply people arguing about what "AI" means in the first place. My comment was intended as a lighthearted "tl;dr" summary for the whole thing.
Huge walls of text? Deal with it.
Besides, if I had to provide a tl;dr it would be "AIs are different from humans in basically every way you can think of."
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