Putting biological consciousness on a pedestal might be blatant sensationalism itself. By consciousness, I specifically mean the behavioral capacity of general intelligence, nothing more. If by consciousness you mean subjective character of experience then yes, there are serious issues with resolving the mind-body problem. But functionally speaking, our brains exist in a physical universe, are massively parallel, and do stochastic computations. Deep learning systems share all three of these traits except that the scale is about 3-5 order of magnitudes smaller (things like incorporating time, biological impulses are missing but if someone claims those features are going to be the dealbreaker then maybe we can have a discussion). And the scale difference is shrinking at lightning speed.
I'm not claiming DNN's are the end-all-be-all of an upcoming general electronic intelligence. But they seem to be doing mind-blowing stuff every few weeks, and it seems we've stumbled upon a radically new aspect of computation.