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.

Leg locomotion was, for decades, thought to be an incredibly difficult problem. There has been very, very painstakingly slow progress there, and robots that essentially lumbered along at one step every 15 seconds and occasionally fell over.

If you had a system that could read all the pages and understand the context, instead of just throwing back 26 million pages to answer your query, it could actually answer the question. You could ask a real question and get an answer as if you were talking to a person who read all those millions and billions of pages, understood them, and synthesized all that information.

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.

Its really important to understand the difference between sentience and consciousness, which are important for human beings.

There is no scientific theory that could lead us from a detailed map of every single neuron in someone's brain to a conscious experience. We don't even have the beginnings of a theory whose conclusion would be "such a system is conscious.

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.