Will machines ever have souls?

Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil takes on several questions about the advance of machines in our society. Proviso: I disagree with the word "futurist" but I will use it where others do. In this article Kurzweil takes on a few questions about machines and their progress in history and how they may evolve over the next few decades. Specifically, I wish to address his response to the question:
"Will super intelligent machines ever have souls?"

Kurzweil's response:

Will super intelligent machines ever have souls?
The soul is a synonym for consciousness… and if we were to consider where consciousness comes from we would have to consider it an emerging property. Brain science is instructive there as we look inside the brain, and we've now looked at it in exquisite detail, you don't see anything that can be identified as a soul - there's just a lot of neurons and they're complicated but there's no consciousness to be seen. Therefore it's an emerging property of a very complex system that can reflect on itself. And if you were to create a system that had similar properties, similar level of complexity it would therefore have the same emerging property and this would be more than an abstraction because these future entities… will be convincing.

It also won't be clear - you won't be able to walk into a room and say, 'OK, humans on the left, machines on the right', because it's going to be all mixed up. You'll have biological humans but they'll have machine processes in their brain, there may be a lot more complexity in the machine intelligence in their brain than the biological portion of their brain. It's not going to be a clear distinction of where humans or biological intelligence stops and machine intelligence starts… [So] we will attribute consciousness to entities even if they have no biology, even if they're fully machine entities: they will seem human, they will seem consciousness, we will attribute souls to them but that's not a scientific statement.

First I question the assertion that the soul is a synonym for consciousness. At the very least this is not unanimously held yet it is stated by Kurzweil as if it were. I understand the inductive logic he applies to attain this conclusion, however, it has several assumptions which are too weak to be relied upon in the fashion he does.

Consciousness as an emerging property.
If this is a description to fill in the obvious blanks we have run into, then it is passable; if this is suggested to be a "how to" as in how to create a consciousness, it is severely lackluster.

An inductive argument with one evidential case is very weak.