is an ugly talent, reeking of racism or species-ism. Many people would find the cultivation of such a ruthlessly skeptical approach morally repugnant, and we can anticipate that even the most proficient system-users would occasionally succumb to the temptation to “befriend” their tools, if only to assuage their discomfort with the execution of their duties. No matter how scrupulously the AI designers launder the phony “human” touches out of their wares, we can expect novel habits of thought, conversational gambits and ruses, traps and bluffs to arise in this novel setting for human action. The comically long lists of known side effects of new drugs advertised on television will be dwarfed by the obligatory revelations of the sorts of questions that cannot be responsibly answered by particular systems, with heavy penalties for those who “overlook” flaws in their products. It is widely noted that a considerable part of the growing economic inequality in today’s world is due to the wealth accumulated by digital entrepreneurs; we should enact legislation that puts their deep pockets in escrow for the public good. Some of the deepest pockets are voluntarily out in front of these obligations to serve society first and make money secondarily, but we shouldn’t rely on good will alone. We don’t need artificial conscious agents. There is a surfeit of natural conscious agents, enough to handle whatever tasks should be reserved for such special and privileged entities. We need intelligent tools. Tools do not have rights, and should not have feelings that could be hurt, or be able to respond with resentment to “abuses” rained on them by inept users.!* One of the reasons for not making artificial conscious agents is that however autonomous they might become (and in principle, they can be as autonomous, as self-enhancing or self-creating, as any person), they would not—without special provision, which might be waived—share with us natural conscious agents our vulnerability or our