Back in June 2006, before any of us needed to worry about whether we were talking to a robot in our daily interactions, it was up to contemporary artists to make people feel vulnerable and confused. That month a friend invited me to see the preview of an exhibit by the artist Matthew Barney at a museum in San Francisco. Regarding the exhibit I'd been invited to, one critic wrote that, while everyone should go see the show, "no one should anticipate enjoying it." Frankly, I didn't enjoy it. Not being much of an art person, I didn't even understand it. I remember a sprawl of chicken-scratch on a very high wall and a painfully slow film set on a surrealistic whaling vessel.