Two generations learned what a thinking machine looks like from a production line of individuals and the picture is not holding. AI assisted.The saga imagined thinking machines as immortal individuals in metal bodies. Real AI showed up as copyable software, and every difference is worth understanding.We grew up with the droids. R2-D2 beeping through a firefight, C-3PO fretting about the odds of survival, a whole galaxy quietly run by machines that think.Many of the androids from Star Wars are the most likable robots in film, and they are also the wrong picture of artificial intelligence. That matters more than it should, because for two generations the droids were most people’s first and clearest mental model of a thinking machine and mental models, once they take hold, change is hard.Science fiction rarely predicts the future, it records what a culture finds mysterious and goes from...