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.

I expect that people are going to feel differently about that once they're aware that AI systems can watch through a camera and can, in some sense, understand what it's seeing.

Its really important to understand the difference between sentience and consciousness, which are important for human beings.

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.

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.

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.

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.