Creating the thinking machine has been one of science’s most alluring quests. Artificial intelligence enables computers to win at chess and model systems as complex as the climate. But even ardent advocates realize something is missing: the creative originality that breaks molds and charts new paths remains a human hallmark. Professor James A. Hendler, now senior constellation professor of the Tetherless World Research Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, at the time a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as well as head of the Autonomous Mobile Robotics Laboratory and the Advanced Information Technology Laboratory at the University of Maryland-a person competent to speak on the subject-confessed the expert opinion of his field when he admitted that the self-awareness of consciousness is not on the perceptible horizon, ‘If you think of awareness as just a point where suddenly things are conscious-I don’t see that happening.’1 The great fear of our fathers, that machines would replace us or that we would all be turned into interchangeable uniform cogs serving vast combines like Charlie Chaplin and Karl Marx envisioned, has proven a dark fantasy. Along with Communism and Freudianism, the mechanistic standardized future was one of the great failed myths […]