I used to say that if you gave me a trillion dollars to build a sentient or conscious machine I would give it back. I could not honestly say I knew how it works.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Everything we have of value as human beings - as a civilization - is the result of our intelligence.

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.