Like other advertisers, computer companies create pleasing personas for their products.

More generally, people personalize the complicated, inanimate entities we depend on.

Imputing consciousness to machines stresses formal cognition over broader human awareness.

Readers of a certain vintage will remember Stanley Kubrick’s classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Released in 1968, the movie is a commentary on the ever-changing relationship of our species to technology—from the primitive bone weapons of our hominid ancestors to the majestic spaceships imagined for 2001 to the mind-transforming circumstances that await future centuries. Mysterious “black monoliths,” radio waves to distant planets, and superior alien intelligences are parts of the plot.

As in many works of science fiction, one question dominates: Will the technologies we build to comprehend and control the world remain our faithful servants, or will we surrender, ultimately, to their machinations?

In the movie, that issue centers on the behavior of a powerful computer, HAL 9000, which controls the mission and operations of the Discovery spaceship, traveling to Jupiter with a crew of five. The two functioning crew members (three are in suspended animation) come to believe that the computer is making certain errors. They decide to shut it down. HAL discovers their scheme by reading their whispering lips. Life support systems are turned off. A solitary survivor pits his wits against the machine’s.

Concerns of this sort are now at the forefront of public consciousness. Who among us does not simultaneously marvel at and fear the advances in computer engineering termed “artificial intelligence”? Will high-powered computers provide the informational resources and technical probity to address a wide range of unsolved problems, perhaps correcting conditions like cancer and Alzheimer’s or discovering new sources of food and energy? Alternatively, will AI be used for new forms of weaponry, surveillance, and environmental degradation? Are we creating a world where only machines survive?

Personalizing the machine

In the movie, the computer HAL, a clever step-down from the IBM acronym,........

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