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.

There are lots of companies that are really trying to collect as much information as they can about every single person on the planet because they think its going to be valuable and it probably already is valuable.

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.

What AI could do is essentially be a power tool that magnifies human intelligence and gives us the ability to move our civilization forward. It might be curing disease, it might be eliminating poverty. Certainly it should include preventing environmental catastrophe. If AI could be instrumental to all those things, then I would feel it was worthwhile.

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.

I expect that people are going to feel differently about that once they're aware that AI systems can watch through a camera and can, in some sense, understand what it's seeing.