To get to the next level in deep learning and artificial intelligence, we need neuromorphic computing hardware - hardware that has been created explicitly to imitate what we believe the brain does.
(Building a computer like your brain)
This approach was conceptualized nearly a century ago in the wonderful 1926 story The Metal Giants, by Golden Age science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton, published in Weird Tales:
...Detmold had attacked the problem from a different standpoint. It was his theory that the sensations of the nervous system are flashed to the brain as electric currents, or vibrations, and that it was the action of these vibratory currents on the brain-stuff that caused consciousness and thought. Thus, instead of trying to make simple, living cells and from them work up the complicated structure of the brain, he had constructed an organ, a brain, of metal, entirely inorganic and lifeless, yet whose atomic structure he claimed was analogous to the atomic structure of a living brain. He had then applied countless different electrical vibrations to this metallic brain-stuff, and finally announced that under vibrations of certain frequencies the organ had showed faint signs of consciousness.
(Read more about Edmond Hamilton's artificial inorganic brain)
(Modern-day neuromorphic computer hardware)
Read more about this idea in these real world science articles:
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