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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.