‘Your tablet with its new whizzy app. Would you say you love that?’

It was a strange question, so I didn’t reply right away. If Aiden had been spending hours thinking about this, then he wouldn’t be happy with an answer straight off the top of my head.

‘I do love it,’ I said finally. ‘It makes me happy, and if it can give me that emotion, then why shouldn’t it loveable?’

‘As loveable as Mum and Dad? As loveable as me?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course not. We’re all related, obviously. Flesh and blood. My tablet isn’t.’

‘But that’s the point I’m making,’ said Aiden. He was really animated now, as if I’d touched on something crucial. ‘Why is flesh and blood so important?’

I rubbed at my forehead and tried to frame an argument, but it didn’t matter because Aiden was in full flow now.

‘I can say that I love Zorro already,’ he said. ‘He’s cute and loyal and funny and … well, just fantastic. But he’s a machine. Really, when it comes down to it, he’s just an assembly of wires and conductors and algorithms. I can’t love a wire by itself or a conductor and I certainly can’t love an algorithm, but when you put them all together like Mum has done with Zorro, then I love the whole. So why don’t I love a solar sail?’

‘Because it doesn’t seem alive.’

‘Exactly.’ Aiden was so enthusiastic, I felt strangely pleased, like I’d given a teacher the right answer in a particularly tough test. ‘The appearance of being alive. I’ve been thinking about Turing.’

‘Who?’

‘Alan Turing. Look him up on your tablet. He’s a really old computer guy, one of the first to even think about computers. He came up with a test to determine whether machines can actually think.’ Aiden stared off into the distance as if marshalling his memories and arranging his thoughts. I waited. ‘He proposed a kind of game. Have one person, the tester, in a room with a computer that’s connected to two other rooms, each with computers. In one of the rooms is a person, but in the other room there’s just the computer and the code that works it. Now have the tester ask questions of the other two rooms. In one, a person will type in their response; in the other the computer will do it. What does it mean if the tester can’t tell what is a human response and what is a machine’s response, no matter how many questions he asks?’

I tried thinking this through, but it was difficult.

‘It doesn’t mean the computer can think,’ I said finally. ‘It just means the computer can imitate a person really well.’

‘But if it can imitate it so well that no one can ever tell the difference, it becomes human, doesn’t it?’

‘Errr …’

‘Or maybe people’s minds are really just like exceptionally sophisticated computers that are programmed to produce emotions like love. That would work, wouldn’t it? We’d all be asking the wrong question. It’s not, “Can machines become human?” but “Are humans really just another type of machine?” If so, then we can love machines and they can love us back. They’d be alive, just as we are alive. Of course, then there’s John Searle and the Chinese Room thought experiment …’