I got the opposite impression - that the timeline for brain emulation was less uncertain than the timeline for AI.

My understanding is that - if we can't find even a single shortcut, whole human brain emulation will produce machine intelligence... eventually. However, engineering-based approaches seem highly likely to beat that path by a considerable margin.

Aeroplanes are not scanned birds, submarines are not scanned fish, cars are not scanned horses - and so on, and so forth.

As far as I can tell, whole human brain emulation as a route to machine intelligence is an approach that is based almost entirely upon wishful thinking by philosophers.