On planes and birds:
No doubt a detailed enough emulation of bird body motions would in fact fly. It is true that a century ago our ability to create detailed bird body simulations was far less than our ability to infer abstract principles of flight. So we abstracted, and built planes, not bird emulations. But this hardly implies that brains must be understood abstractly before they can be emulated.
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I don't know what Othello has to do with Moore's Law.
Othello was a Moor. Moore proposed the law. Up a couple, you confused the two.
Here's a great article by Paul Allen about why the singularity won't happen anytime soon. Basically a lot of the things we do are just not amenable to awesome looking exponential graphs.