When I read philosophy or neuroscience papers about consciousness, I don't get the sense we're any closer to understanding it than we were 50 years ago.

When people talk about the singularity, when people talk about superintelligent AI, they're not talking about sentience or consciousness. They're talking about superhuman ability to make high-quality decisions.

It's unlikely that machines would spontaneously decide they didn't like people, or that they had goals in opposition to those of human beings.

Chess programs don't play chess the way humans play chess. We don't really know how humans play chess, but one of the things we do is spot some opportunity on the chess board toward a move to capture the opponent's queen.

The robot is not going to want to be switched off because you've given it a goal to achieve and being switched off is a way of failing - so it will do its best not to be switched off. That's a story that isn't made clear in most movies but it I think is a real issue.

When I read philosophy or neuroscience papers about consciousness, I don't get the sense we're any closer to understanding it than we were 50 years ago.

I used to say that if you gave me a trillion dollars to build a sentient or conscious machine I would give it back. I could not honestly say I knew how it works.