Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking is on record about the rising class of technology that can perform almost any conceivable task, from driving us to work to babysitting our children. His dour outlook, expressed to the BBC in 2014: “I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

Hawking says the primitive AI we’ve known to date — the kind that switches on the air-conditioning before you get home from work — is useful enough. But he fears the next stage, when intelligent, thinking machines can independently improve themselves and begin to determine their own destinies. Will that ability exceed humans’ ability to contain it? What then? Where will humans fit into an AI world? Will the robots have any use for us?

These questions are not so farfetched to the nearly 200 scientists, scholars, artists and public intellectuals who contributed essays for the recently released book What to Think About Machines That Think, edited by John Brockman. Few are as pessimistic as Hawking, but most agree humans should be busy thinking through our future coexistence with the new class of being now under construction. Will they serve us? Will we serve them? Or will we somehow merge into a single, super-being? ...