Some deep thinkers, following in the footsteps of Turing and Dennett, argued that any AI you could have an open-ended conversation with and whose responses on any topic remained indistinguishable from a human interlocutor was as conscious as you were. This raised troubling questions about the likes of Smart-Alec and Iskander. The software engineers who had built the robots insisted this wasn’t the case. The underlying processes were completely different, and consciousness was (it had turned out) superfluous to intelligent conversation. This raised troubling questions about humans.