[schoen]

None of the gameplaying AIs that have shown superhuman performance recently have needed to be conscious or aware of what they were doing in order to perform at that level. They likely don't experience qualia but they can still trounce human players. Similarly, Google's amazing improvements in machine translation haven't required consciousness or qualia.

There are certainly lots of people in Silicon Valley who are fascinated by the prospect of making machines with conscious experience, as you think is impossible, but few indications that this would be necessary to make non-conscious forms of AI into a factor that powerfully affects our future.