Toasters That Can Think. But Will They Care?

The most famous saying of the philosopher René Descartes might need an update soon. In the coming age of artificial intelligence, “I think, therefore I am” also could apply to a car, a toaster or a phone.

And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

“Generally speaking, consciousness and self-awareness are overrated,” Jürgen Schmidhuber, who is a pioneer in A.I., told The Times.

Creating artificial intelligence is more godlike than it is an engineering discipline, Dr. Schmidhuber said, adding that conscious machines not only are close to reality but that the field also will develop a new superintelligent species.

That’s a long way from Siri, the iPhone’s A.I. assistant. Susan Bennett, who gave the original voice to Siri, wonders if humans think as well as they did before such technology.

“As machines get smarter, is the opposite happening to us?” she wrote in The Times. She also wondered if A.I. eventually will replace humans and whether it will be able to create literature, comedy and art. “We’re about to find out in the next few years.”

But there’s no need to wait to find out. The technology is already infiltrating art. Trevor Paglen’s “Sight Machine” combines artificial intelligence and image-making technology with an avant-garde string quartet that plays “a concert while Paglen’s own A.I. mapping system projects machine-generated images of the musicians behind them in real time,” The Times reported. The code Mr. Paglen wrote for the piece is similar to surveillance A.I. algorithms.

“I wanted to make an artwork that really underlined the contradiction between how machines see and how humans see,” he told The Times. “Image-making, along with storytelling and music, is the stuff that culture is made out of. We’re now handing over the ability to tell those stories to artificial intelligence networks and machine-vision systems.”

Mr. Paglen sees a future where photos people post on social media automatically affect things such as insurance policies and credit ratings.

“In a very real way, our rights and freedoms will be modulated by our metadata signatures,” he said. “What’s at stake, obviously, is the fu- ture of the human race! I’m actually serious here.”

Another person with a vision to take seriously is the futurist Ray Kurzweil, who Bill Gates once described as “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.” Mr. Kurzweil told The Times that he thinks that rather than replace humans, A.I. will merge with them and produce hybrids by 2045, thanks to nanorobots as small as blood cells that link our brains to “the cloud.”

“We will be able to transcend our current limitations and extend our thinking by one millionfold,” he said.

The potential of 21st- century revolution forces us to answer a question we’ve never faced before, Dov Seidman told The Times: “What does it mean to be human in the age of intelligent machines?”

Mr. Seidman, the head of LRN, which advises businesses on creating ethical cultures, said humans will be able to maintain an edge over A.I. because we have something they never will: a heart.

“Humans can love,” he said, “they can have compassion, they can dream.”

Mr. Seidman also offered an update to the thinking of Mr. Descartes:

“I care, therefore I am; I hope, therefore I am; I imagine, therefore I am. I am ethical, therefore I am. I have a purpose, therefore I am. I pause and reflect, therefore I am.”

Machines may be getting smarter, but humans can love.