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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.