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.

If human beings are losing every time, it doesn't matter whether they're losing to a conscious machine or an completely non conscious machine, they still lost. The singularity is about the quality of decision-making, which is not consciousness at all.

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.

Some PhD physicists write software or work for hedge funds, but physics still has a problem with having very smart people but not enough opportunities.

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.

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.

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.