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.

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.

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.

You're able to use a search engine, like Google or Bing or whatever. But those engines don't understand anything about pages that they give you; they essentially index the pages based on the words that you're searching, and then they intersect that with the words in your query, and they use some tricks to figure out which pages are more important than others. But they don't understand anything.

There are lots of companies that are really trying to collect as much information as they can about every single person on the planet because they think its going to be valuable and it probably already is valuable.

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.

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.