those trade-offs: you give up a little versatility, a little humanity, and get a crowd- pleasing show). Watson is not good company, in spite of misleading ads from IBM that suggest a general conversational ability, and turning Watson into a plausibly multidimensional agent would be like turning a hand calculator into Watson. Watson could be a useful core faculty for such an agent, but more like a cerebellum or an amygdala than a mind—at best, a special-purpose subsystem that could play a big supporting role, but not remotely up to the task of framing purposes and plans and building insightfully on its conversational experiences. Why would we want to create a thinking, creative agent out of Watson? Perhaps Turing’s brilliant idea of an operational test has lured us into a trap: the quest to create at least the illusion of a real person behind the screen, bridging the “uncanny valley.” The danger, here, is that ever since Turing posed his challenge—which was, after all, a challenge to fool the judges—AI creators have attempted to paper over the valley with cutesy humanoid touches, Disneyfication effects that will enchant and disarm the uninitiated. Weizenbaum’s ELIZA was the pioneer example of such superficial illusion- making, and it was his dismay at the ease with which his laughably simple and shallow program could persuade people they were having a serious heart-to-heart conversation that first sent him on his mission. He was right to be worried. If there is one thing we have learned from the restricted Turing Test competitions for the Loebner Prize, it is that even very intelligent people who aren’t tuned in to the possibilities and shortcuts of computer programming are readily taken in by simple tricks. The attitudes of people in AI toward these methods of dissembling at the “user interface” have ranged from contempt to celebration, with a general appreciation that the tricks are not deep but can be potent. One shift in attitude that would be very welcome is a