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.

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.

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.

A lot of people talk about sometime around 2030, machines will be more powerful than the human brain, in terms of the raw number of computations they can do per second. But that seems completely irrelevant. We don't know how the brain is organized, how it does what it does.

To my knowledge nobody - no one who is publishing papers in the main field of AI - is even working on consciousness. I think there are some neuroscientists who are trying to understand it, but I'm not aware that they've made any progress.

If you had a system that could read all the pages and understand the context, instead of just throwing back 26 million pages to answer your query, it could actually answer the question. You could ask a real question and get an answer as if you were talking to a person who read all those millions and billions of pages, understood them, and synthesized all that information.

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.