With entertainment and science joining forces to spin cautionary tales, it felt very alarming, and very zeitgeist. But it also felt confusing, in that zeitgeist is a response to something. Film production runs in roughly three-year cycles, and if you looked back three years from the glut of A.I.-related releases, you might expect to find an event that had led to the screenplays. Perhaps a Nobel Prize relating to consciousness, or a successful robot project with the profile of the Large Hadron Collider, or Dolly the sheep. But there was nothing. In fact, breakthroughs in A.I. research were either conspicuous by their absence, or so nuanced that you would struggle to convince lay people that the breakthrough existed at all. This raised a question: Was A.I. anxiety in part a projected fear of something else? In particular, I wondered if it stemmed from a general disconnect in our relationship with technology.

We have laptops and cellphones and tablets, and most of us don’t understand how they work. But the devices seem to understand how we work. They anticipate what we want to say in text messages and search-engine inputs, and know what we want to buy, see and read. This one-way understanding makes us anxious. We locate the anxiety in the machines, which translates as anxiety about A.I.

But there is a mistake here. The machines in question are not strong A.I.’s. They are weak. They have no motivation, no intention; they’re neutral. The thing with an agenda is us: consumers, who want to buy the machines, and manufacturers, who want to sell them. And looming over both, giant tech companies, whose growth only ever seems to be exponential, whose practices are opaque, and whose power is both massive and without true oversight. Combine all this with government surveillance and lotus-eating public acquiescence, and it’s not the machine component that scares me. It’s the human component.

So here is a counterargument, in favor of the machines. In very broad terms, human behavior is frightening when it is unreasonable. And reason might be precisely the area where artificial intelligence excels.

I can imagine a world where machine intelligence runs hospitals and health services, allocating resources more quickly and competently than any human counterpart.

Public works aside, the investigation into strong artificial intelligence might also lead to understanding human consciousness, the most interesting aspect of what we are. This in turn could lead to machines that have our capacity for reason and sentience, but different energy requirements and a completely different relationship with mortality. That could mean a different future. A longer future. In which case, we could rephrase the warnings of Mr. Hawking and Mr. Wozniak. Where they say that A.I. will spell the end of humans, we could say that one day, A.I. will be what survives of us.