What Is It Like to Be a Smartphone?

Here, as my second Sunday Rerun, is a Rough Type post from 2020 that draws inspiration from the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s mind-bending work on the varieties of consciousness. If a real AI were to appear, would we recognize it as an intelligent being? Would it recognize us?

Still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris”

“The fact that we cannot expect ever to accommodate in our language a detailed description of Martian or bat phenomenology should not lead us to dismiss as meaningless the claim that bats...