Keep telling yourself, “Computers are just chess-playing robots. They’ll never understand a Shakespeare sonnet.” You’re whistling past the graveyard, baby.

In 1955, when “computer” was the title on the bsuiness card of a practical mathematician, and you read the result of your numerical computation off the machine’s front panel in binary, it was excusable to disbelieve that computing machinery would ever perform spreadsheets, virtual reality, or Siri.

We should be, well, smarter now. Since we can understand a Shakespeare sonnet, there is absolutely no reason to think a computer cannot be made to do the same. We don’t know how to do it today, but that’s just timing.

Furthermore, it doesn’t matter if computers can read poetry. If they can avoid collisions on the freeway and figure out which pallet in the warehouse has the FUBAR-432 sitting on it, they can replace us. Understanding poetry is something we value internally, but damn few of us make a living understanding poetry.

Computers will become intelligent. Their intelligence will be different than ours. When they become self-aware, they will likely value different aspects of their intelligence than we do. The millionth digit of pi may be more interesting to computers than Hamlet’s Solliloquy or the Ten Commandments. If we smugly judge them for their choices, we miss the point, to our peril.

Ask any tiger. It’s strength and practical intelligence that matters when competing for resources.