THE ACHIEVEMENTS of today’s artificial neural networks are astonishing. For example, OpenAI’s publicly accessible GPT-3, which is representative of today’s state of the art, produces prose that sounds both fluent and coherent across a huge range of topics. Cars now drive themselves in complicated traffic situations. Robots load and unload dishwashers without chipping a cup. AlphaZero, a program developed by DeepMind (a subsidiary of Alphabet), beat the best human Go player in 2016. Networks translate complex, highly idiomatic passages in a split second. They predict protein-folding better than human experts. Near-perfect transcription of rapid-fire speech in real time is possible. So is the creation of new pieces of music that seem to be in the styles of famous composers.

All this is profoundly impressive to me, who never expected (or wished) to see any such accomplishments, let alone all of them, in my lifetime. Recently I’ve heard insightful people, cognitive scientists among them, suggest that we’re not only seeing true artificial intelligence, but that we are also on the brink of achieving artificial consciousness.