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.

You're able to use a search engine, like Google or Bing or whatever. But those engines don't understand anything about pages that they give you; they essentially index the pages based on the words that you're searching, and then they intersect that with the words in your query, and they use some tricks to figure out which pages are more important than others. But they don't understand anything.

Most of the AI goes into figuring which are the important pages you want. And to some extent what your query means, and what you're likely to be after based on your previous behavior and other information it collects about you.

To my knowledge nobody - no one who is publishing papers in the main field of AI - is even working on consciousness. I think there are some neuroscientists who are trying to understand it, but I'm not aware that they've made any progress.

You have a very precisely defined goal and you build a machine that's superhuman in its capabilities for achieving goals. If it turns out that the subsequent behavior of the robot in achieving that goal was not what you want, you have a real problem.

No one has a clue how to build a conscious machine, at all. We have less clue about how to do that than we have about build a faster-than-light spaceship.

AI's ability to recognize visual categories and images is now pretty close to what human beings can manage, and probably better than a lot of people's, actually. AI can have more knowledge of detailed categories, like animals and so on.