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.

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.

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.

The singularity has nothing to do with consciousness.

Some people think that, inevitably, every robot that does any task is a bad thing for the human race, because it could be taking a job away. But that isn't necessarily true. You can also think of the robot as making a person more productive and enabling people to do things that are currently economically infeasible. But a person plus a robot or a fleet of robots could do things that would be really useful.

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.

Google or other search engines are examples of AI, and relatively simple AI, but they're still AI. That plus an awful lot of hardware to make it work fast enough.