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.

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.

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.

The singularity has nothing to do with consciousness.

It's very hard to predict what kind of uses we'd make of assistants that could read and understand all the information the human race has ever generated. It could be really transformational.

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.

The more we learn about AI and about how the brain works, the more amazing the brain seems. Just the sheer amount of computation it does is truly incredible, especially for a couple of pounds of meat.