Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. At the moment, artificial intelligence may have perfect memories and be better at arithmetic than us, but they are clueless. It takes a few seconds of interaction with any digital assistant to realize one is not in the presence of a very bright interlocutor. Among some of the unexpected items users have found in their shopping lists after talking to (or near) Amazon's Alexa are 150,000 bottles of shampoo, sled dogs, "hunk of poo," and a girlfriend. The mere exasperation of talking to a personal assistant can be enough to miss human companionship, feel nostalgia of all things analog and dumb, and foreswear any future attempts at communicating with mindless pieces of metal inexplicably labelled "smart."

A cognitive subject – whose individuality is based on dependence on other individualities – clarifies the notion of knowledge through an ecological model, where the environment is not only understood as a physical environment, but rather as a complex network of social, historical, material, geographic, cultural, institutional relationships. The cognitive subject is immersed in this network, along with his epistemic attempts, his aspirations and his cognitive ways. Epistemic activity is assessed on the basis of the success in promoting ecosystems committed to promoting a continuous increase in collective individual knowledge. Furthermore, epistemic activity is evaluated on the basis of success in promoting true and justified beliefs (This is the key point for a discussion on creativity of sentients). Cognitive subjects are not self-sufficient epistemic because they need interactions with other subjects.