When I ask Sebastian Benthall, of UC Berkeley’s School of Information, this question—if he thinks contemporary A.I. could become sentimental—he tells me that in many ways, an emotional reaction from programs already does happen, we just don’t call it that yet. “Why does your GPS make mistakes? Why do search engines lead you in certain directions and not others? If this were an individual, we’d call these things biases, or sentiment. But that’s because we think of ourselves as one being, when really there are a lot of biological systems cooperating with each other, but sometimes, independent of each other. A.I. doesn’t see itself that way.”