I’m mixing my 20th-century sci-fi authors, but like Billy Pilgrim naked in a Tralfamadore zoo, we may be kept as pets by intelligent machines. That’s what Philip K. Dick Android, who can learn new words in real-time, promises his NOVA interlocutors.

Or perhaps they’ll eliminate us. Or maybe by the time they exist, we will be very different. We might become those conscious machines we so fear. We might be them. Nobody knows.