Literary agent John Brockman is kind of the Kim Fowley / Malcolm McClaren of high end science writing. He started out in the Sixties promoting the Monkees’ movie Head, but now runs a sort of mutual admiration society called Edge.org. Every January his huge stable of very smart clients ponder a Big Question at length. This year, 191 eggheads, such as Steven Pinker, Christopher Chabris, and John Tooby, tackle “What do you think about machines that think?”

And they have thought a lot about thinking machines. There may well be over 100,000 words of cogitation here.

I haven’t thought much about thinking machines, so the only one I’ve read so far is one of the shortest responses, Virginia Heffernan’s single paragraph:

Outsourcing to machines the many idiosyncrasies of mortals—making interesting mistakes, brooding on the verities, propitiating the gods by whittling and arranging flowers— skews tragic. But letting machines do the thinking for us? This sounds like heaven. Thinking is optional. Thinking is suffering. It is almost always a way of being careful, of taking ​hypervigilant heed, of resenting the past and fearing the future in the form of maddeningly redundant ​internal ​language. If machines can relieve us of this onerous non-responsibility, which is in pointless overdrive in too many of us, I’m for it. Let the machines perseverate on tedious and value-laden questions about whether private or public school is “right” for my children; whether intervention in Syria is “appropriate”; whether germs or solitude are “worse” for a body. This will free us newly footloose humans up to play, rest, ​write and whittle—the engrossing flowstates out of which come the actions that actually enrich, enliven and heal the world.

Sounds good to me, although I mostly like mentally whittling about stuff of no use to myself.

Personally, I’d like machines to think for me whether I have the right amount of stuff in my pantry. When I go to Costco, for example, I can never remember whether I need another giant sack of Kirkland brand Big Red Cups. So, my garage tends to fill up with extra sacks of Big Red Cups until enough time has gone by that I run completely out of Big Red Cups.

Costco always knows when it’s about to run out of Big Red Cups, but I don’t, so I end up taking on a lot of the inventory carrying costs that retailers shouldered before the inventory revolution of the 1980s allowed them to offload these issues to consumers.

Target has brought out a smartphone app that combines a shopping list with a map of where the product is in your local Target store. But Target is, basically, for single people, while Costco is for married people. I haven’t found anything like that on any Costco app.

Costco seems to go out of its way not to help you remember or find what specifically you need at the moment. (Costco employees have perfected that aura of abstraction that discourages asking them where anything is.) Costco prefers you to methodically wander each aisle being reminded by the sight of the merchandise that you may or may not need to buy more of it: “Hey, look: Big Red Cups! Do I need another 180 BRCs? … I should be able to remember this, but I’ve been spending too much time whittling my all-important opinion on Syrian intervention. Well, I guess it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

Okay, here’s one more Edge response, even shorter. Freeman Dyson, the last of the WWII physicists, writes: