These AI dreamers don’t fit the stereotype

Marshall Kools shares an apartment in the NoPa neighborhood of San Francisco with two roommates, sleeps Harry Potter-style in a nook-like room beneath the stairs, owns no designer clothing beyond a dress shirt from Giorgio Armani and plays Sade’s “Love Deluxe” on repeat.

Sade’s multiplatinum album was released in October 1992, a month or so before the introduction of a device generally considered the progenitor of the smartphone. Back then, the marketing of advanced computation as a form of anthropomorphized sentience did not exist. Neither, for that matter, did Marshall Kools.