Why "sentient" AI will change everything

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember Eliza, a program that simulated a Rogerian psychoanalyst and was popular in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a clever trick – Eliza simply cut sentences into parts and parroted back what you told it in questions – but in the heady, post-Summer-of-Love days she was a miracle of modern technology. She was a computer …