Very soon, we will say machines think as we do, consciously. It won't be because we have any idea what consciousness is. But we will mean something when we say it. And that we will say it--and, finally, forget to say it--has a meaning of its own. Machines will think as we do when we recognize them doing so. We will not come to realize that machines think through analysis, machines will come to think when we have empathy for them. Machines have been cultivating empathy in us for a long time.

Last night, I watched part of a documentary on Jane Goodal; really, it was on chimpanzees. The documentary's strategy was simple. It showed the chimps behaving, apparently thinking, as humans do when we attribute thinking to them. It even showed that chimp and human intelligence develop at about the same rate. The chimps were adorable. It was easy to fall in love with them on television.

Next, the documentary showed hunters killing chimps for meat. To be sure, chimps are not the only bush meat. They are just part of an abundance of it. The documentary showed chimp arms being smoked over fires to prepare them for shipment to market. The documentary showed piles of chimp corpses. It showed a chimp baby being forced to play with its dead brother by its brother's killers. The documentary showed the faces of chimps: skin burned and shrunken back, exposing teeth; eyes cooked like egg whites in their sockets and filled with ash. It showed the carnage on tables in the market, in cooking pots, in peoples' mouths.

To permit a holocaust, remove empathy. Had the documentary not followed the strategy of first likening chimps to humans, the viewer would have been less likely to show concern for what is happening to them.

But the chimps' was not the only holocaust documented. Theirs took place within the larger one of the forest, and that one within the politics of civil war in Africa.

But what was striking about the documentary was its need for this strategy at all. It is, sadly, not strange that we can have no empathy for chimp, man, or forest. What is interesting is that reverence should require empathy at all.

It is possible that machines have already begun to think, and it is possible they have begun not to recognize us.