I think it'll get us closer to Solaris or V'GER than C3P0. This is admittedly not my expertise, but human cognition is a byproduct of millions of years of biological evolution. When you start a system in an environment utterly devoid of biology, the structures and means that will appear have no reason to resemble our own. That was actually Alan Turing's point when he came up with the test: not "are you intelligent" but "can you imitate intelligence:" He saw "intelligence" as an impossible thing to judge; he argued that "imitating intelligence" was easy. I think the processes you're talking about are going to lead to "intelligence" - I'd argue that in many ways, they already have. I don't think they'll ever lead to human intelligence, though. Again, read the Sherry Turkle book.BEAM robotics, but with an AI based on this emergent type of decision-making, which I do believe is the path to C3PO.
"Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?"