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.

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.

We call ourselves Homo sapiens--man the wise--because our intelligence is so important to us. For thousands of years, we have tried to understand how we think: that is, how a mere handful of matter can perceive, understand, predict, and manipulate a world far larger and more complicated than itself. The field of artificial intelligence, or AI, goes further still: it attempts not just to understand but also to build intelligent entities.

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.

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.

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.

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.