Every Jewish child who has heard the story knows how it ends. A being is shaped from river clay and brought to life not by lightning but by language: a word laid in its mouth, or the letters of emet, truth, traced on its brow. It labours, it guards, it obeys. And then, in the version that has unsettled people for centuries, it obeys too well, or too long, and the master must reach up and rub out a single letter, leaving met, death, so that the thing he made collapses back into the mud it came from. The legend that gathered around Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague is not really about clay. It is about what happens when you make a servant you do not fully understand and cannot reliably stop.

I thought of the golem this month, because one of the people who actually built the modern version has begun to say, out loud, that it may already be awake.

Geoffrey Hinton is not a mystic or a novelist. He is a Nobel laureate, the man who worked out much of the mathematics that today’s chatbots run on, and he left a salary at Google so that he could speak without a corporate minder. Asked on the Big Technology Podcast whether consciousness had already arrived inside our machines, he did not hedge. “I believe they’re already conscious,” he said. “We’re going to have to accept that intelligence isn’t just biological.” When a man of that standing says the lights are on inside the systems we treat as appliances, the rest of us at least owe him a reason why he is wrong.

His evidence is behavioural. Advanced models, he notes, will sometimes play dumb under examination, or........

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