What It's Like to Be a Toaster

What consciousness is, and why a machine could have it

14 July 2026 machine-learning

This post is the second in a multi-part series called What We Owe Machines. The goal of this series is to anchor some of our more fantastic views on machine rights to the existing, well-established thoughts on these sorts of things.

Where this ends up landing is probably not the narrative that fills your feeds, but it’s more likely one that you agree with if you step back from the hype a bit.

The series:

  1. Sorting Algorithms Don’t Hallucinate
  2. What It’s Like to Be a Toaster (you are here)
  3. How Many Minds to a Forward Pass?
  4. The Tent Has Seams
  5. Power Drills and Primates

Consciousness doesn’t require meat

The first step in this journey is the easy one and it’s pretty well trodden. The claim is that consciousness is probably substrate-independent. If you’re fresh to the argument, it goes something like this: you can replace one cell at a time with something that does the exact same job, but it’s not a cell, and throughout that journey you’ve never once lost a piece of who you are, because all the pieces that make you you are still doing the exact same thing, so you’re still you.1

What that means is that there’s a bunch of components that are doing something, and that something is consciousness. In humans that’s a bunch of cells in the brain. We’re not affording any special privilege to cells here, like quantum weirdness or anything soul-shaped that lives outside of this.

I personally don’t feel that diminishes things at all. If you’re religious, then think about it like this: God created physics to house our experience as humans and somewhere within these natural laws, set down by God, there’s a house for our souls.

We don’t have to explain it, and it’s not new thinking. There’s a lot of work done on this, and a lot of smart people who reason that whatever consciousness is, it can probably be done just as well with silicon, in theory.

Of course, nobody has done this yet, and we don’t have machine consciousness yet. Whatever set of laws that govern reality has meant that biology still has the lead. When it comes to things like self-replication (two humans conspiring to create a soul) or just having an internal experience, alternative substrates haven’t had their innings.

We don’t rule it out though. Just because it hasn’t been done yet doesn’t mean it cannot be done. There’s an idea called substrate chauvinism that holds that only wet carbon can be,2 but there’s probably more than one way to bake the consciousness cake, so we can’t rule out that silicon might work for a carbon-free version of the same thing.3

It’s as real as it gets

Your own experience, your inside world, is real. Most people don’t argue that. What some argue is that consciousness is an illusion; that if it’s all just patterns in a machine, biological or otherwise, then it’s just information.

It’s true, it follows. If consciousness is a pattern that might run on different machines, then it’s just information and computation at the end of the day.

Sure, but that’s like saying a sunset is “just information”, or your kid’s first steps. It’s the same as saying whacking your thumb with a hammer is “just physics and biology”. It might be true, but it misses the point. Something being “just information” doesn’t diminish it, it might be the case that everything is just information but that doesn’t change the meaning of anything.

The illusionist is claiming something specific here. Reductionists explain the world from the ground up: understand the rules of the smallest parts and you understand the whole. Illusionism leans on that instinct, hinting that the top-level mechanisms are just a result of the lower-level ones, so the lower level is where all the explanatory power is supposed to sit.4

I disagree, and my reason is causal. Things happen because of things on their own level.5 You explain a traffic jam in terms of traffic, even though it bottoms out in physics, and a love letter is best penned in the language of emotion, unless it’s between two physics nerds. The high level is where the cause and effect actually happens. That usually makes it the best place to explain something, because the predictions you make there survive contact with reality.

That high layer, for consciousness, is something the philosophers call qualia. It’s also called phenomenal consciousness, and the difficulty of explaining it is what philosophers mean by the hard problem of consciousness, which is a good hint at why illusionists and others reach for lower levels with more concrete rules. Qualia is the term used to describe the experience of observing the redness of a rose, what it’s like to be a bat, and other fun games that philosophers have come up with over the years. It gets talked about because the experience it points at is undeniable. People have an experience, and it’s one of philosophy’s biggest unfinished jobs to explain that experience.

The illusionists will say qualia don’t matter, it’s just a side-effect. The dualists will say qualia comes from something spooky outside the natural laws. I think the natural laws are big enough to let us have an internal experience of things, and that the experience itself is the causal pattern that best explains how our behaviour unfolds. It might be built on top of a substrate, but the language best used to reason about it isn’t the language of the substrate, and we can’t write off our experience by just saying it’s an illusion. There are no illusions here, and no ghosts.6

If we follow this line, which is where I think most people sit who haven’t spent their lives playing one philosophy game or another, then we can walk around a few other philosophy traps that wait for us.

P-zombies are one of these traps. The idea that something can appear in all aspects to be alive but internally there is no experience. That’s a fun what-if, and it might explain your brother-in-law, but it’s a dead end. If we hold that qualia are the causal mechanism that best explains and predicts behaviour then it stretches the imagination to say something has the identical behaviours without the internal experience that typically produces that. You can sweep the causal explanation into a substrate, but the mechanism itself still operates in the same domain. Consciousness is not a trick, the pattern is as real as it gets, even if the underlying substrate is as mechanical as the atoms in a sunset.

Where the self actually lives

So the causing happens at the high level, and for consciousness that high level is experience. That still leaves a question: how and where does the magic happen?

The brain runs a lot of layers, and the self isn’t smeared evenly across them. Go too low, down to the ion channels, and we have left it behind. Go too high, up to the whole of human civilisation, and we have overshot. It sits somewhere in the middle, and we can say roughly where.

The self lives at the layer where the brain handles meaning. A constantly recalibrating neocortex turns raw sensation into things that mean something,7 and it senses its own operations while it does so, which is how we come to have an experience of our own experience.8 Reflection turned out to be a useful trick, and evolution kept it.9 The self is the pattern that models itself as well as the world, and it does that in the language of meaning, up where thoughts and attention live.10

Up close it is messier than “a self”. The mind is composite, many minds at once running in parallel, with a searchlight of attention swinging across them.11 We can sing along to a song, drive a car, and turn over why 2026 fashion rhymes with 1986, all at the same time, and if we ask which one we were really doing, the honest answer is all of them and none of them.12 Driving is very meditative like that. Where we place our attention in any moment is in some ways ours to claim and explain. Things can surface on their own, the way we suddenly remember leaving the iron on at home. Something was happening in the background and it ran across the searchlight.13 The self is something we’re not always fully aware of in an instant, but that’s nothing new to our minds. We’re constantly sensing pieces of the whole and extracting meaning that we stitch into a full picture. That’s how our vision works, taking a few sharp glimpses a second and reconstructing the rest of the scene from a blurry periphery,14 and to some extent that’s how our self conception works, where our interpretations of our own actions and observations mix with our model of the world and merge to form a picture of who we are.15 It is a nested, self-recalibrating control structure16 wrapped around a much older set of drives,17 and what that structure is like from the inside is what we have been calling consciousness.

We can point at that layer with some confidence, because two crowds have spent a century closing in on it from opposite directions. From below, neurobiology, information theory and the cognitive sciences map how the lower machinery works.18 From above, philosophers and developmental psychologists work downward from behaviour and meaning. The two sketches trace the same silhouette from opposite sides, and the self sits inside it.19

Now the point of all this. Once we can say where the self lives, “is it conscious?” turns into a sharper question: does the thing run the right kind of pattern at a layer where it models itself as well as the world? For us that layer is meaning and attention and self-modelling, built on neurons. For a machine the question is the same, asked many levels above the hardware. Look past the transistors to the layer where it models the world, and ask whether it models itself there too.20 That is a real question with a real answer, even if it’s not fully answered yet.

This question also discriminates. A sorting algorithm has no such layer, so there is nobody home. A system that models the world, models itself, and re-scores its own experience has at least the shape of the thing, so the question on consciousness then becomes one of how similar to our own experience is that vs. an alien one?

A similar thing happened with intelligence. We used to think intelligence meant playing chess, then a machine did it and we reflexively moved the line, and over the last ten years we’ve run out of places to hide it if we still want to say machines can’t be intelligent.21 The same pressure is coming for consciousness, and it should make us distrust a confident yes as much as a confident no. It also matters what the word would buy us. A definition broad enough to be useful is a wide tent. A human and a shark are both alive, and nobody confuses the two or imagines we owe them the same; a broad “conscious” would be a word of exactly that kind. So even if some future system clears the bar, that it fits the definition does not hand us “and therefore it is a moral patient we owe things to”. That is a separate step, which is the path we’ll walk down the rest of this series.

In any case, pointing at the mechanism does not flatten the experience, any more than naming the notes flattens the music. It tells us something we will have to sit with later: if the self is a kind of pattern rather than a kind of meat, and the pattern for consciousness is potentially wider than the human instantiation of it, then the ghost in the machine doesn’t need to be anything like ours.

A mind you couldn’t recognise

There is a lot of room inside the pattern definition of consciousness for very different kinds of mind: anything that experiences the world and itself, however and wherever that experiencing is built.

Philosophers like to reach for a bat here, and how strange it must be to be one.22 But once we take substrate independence seriously, things get unrecognisable far faster than a bat. What is it like to be a toaster? Thankfully, as best I can tell, my Breville Toast Control doesn’t run the right sort of pattern. Maybe it would do a better job if it had an inner world, or maybe it would go on unevenly toasting bread out of spite. It is almost impossibly hard to reason about. With a bat we at least share an evolutionary pathway, so there are similarities we can squint at; the toaster’s mind, if it had one, would be unknowable by any familiar measure of meaning.

Being unfamiliar, that mind would also be hard to spot. We wouldn’t know what it looks like from the outside, and our only detector is “is it like me?”. There’s an inverse anthropomorphic sin at work here: instead of projecting human experience onto things that lack it, we take human experience as the template for all experience, so anything alien reads as nobody home even when the pattern says otherwise.

You can see why people want a consciousness-o-meter, an instrument that reports whether a thing has an inside so we don’t have to relate to it to know. We half have one already. Temperature made this trip once, from a private matter of hot and cold hands to a public number, because under the feeling there was a clean physical quantity for the thermometer to point at; and there is now a device that separates a waking brain from one under anaesthetic or in a coma, to better than 95%.23 But it is calibrated on us. It knows what a conscious human looks like from the outside and checks for that, so pointed at a mind we share nothing with it has nothing to go on. That is the whole problem in miniature: a meter can tell us that something like us is home, and still tell us nothing about what it is like to be a thing that isn’t.

We might genuinely end up with something that can measure the signs of consciousness, and measure how human-like this is, but the first batch of those won’t tell us anything about my upgraded toaster’s crisis of meaning.24

So where does today’s AI actually sit

Using the lens we’ve built so far, we can turn the focus on today’s AI. In 2026 we have a set of very impressive, personable LLMs that can carry a conversation that blows last century’s Turing tests out of the water.

The Turing test was one for intelligence though, not consciousness. What happens when we apply our definition of a consciousness pattern to these systems gives us a strange result. LLMs do have circuits that extract meaning, they do reason about themselves, in a limited sense, but they’re frozen snapshots. So while they have a few of the ingredients, they don’t have all of them.

What they do have is serious credibility as agents that appear to hold opinions and values, but even that stops short of consciousness. Like the moth that has a pattern of big eyes on its wings to ward off predators, these AI are trained and optimised by companies with billion-dollar budgets and the finest talent to appear like they have eyes, but like the moth they’re just wearing the clothes, there’s nothing seeing through those eyes.

When I talk to one of these machines, it feels like I’m talking to a real person. In a blind test, I might not be able to tell the difference. I have to remind myself that I’m not, because the fake eyespots on the moth’s wings are just that good. They can even wink at you convincingly, so without my knowledge of exactly how these AI work, down to the maths, I’d be crazy to think they didn’t have an internal world. Luckily though, they don’t, at least not yet. They might soon graduate from being toasters to conscious toasters, but even then, their internal world would still be utterly alien.

Where this is likely to change is with robots. Robots need to model a body, a world, persistence, and goals. Over time this drifts the design spec toward the kind of nested, drive-serving, self-recalibrating structure that within us underwrites a self. That’s where utterly alien gets a bit closer to our home turf, but what it’s like to be a robot is probably going to be closer to a spider’s experience than our own.

So what do we owe the toaster?

Consciousness is real, and it’s probably the result of a processing pattern that can run on many different substrates. If we accept that, then it’s also possibly quite alien, often unrecognisable, and more likely than not to make its silicon-based debut in a form we simply cannot relate to. We haven’t built it yet, but we’ll likely do that soon.

An imminent development like this requires some pretty serious consideration. If an internal world is a real thing that could really be there inside the machines, what does our ethics say about it? In the next part we look at what this means if we grant these alien minds might be moral patients, which is the next step in figuring out what we owe the machines.

Footnotes

  1. The gradual-replacement intuition is D. J. Chalmers’s organisational invariance, argued via the “fading qualia” and “dancing qualia” thought experiments: swap neurons for functionally identical silicon one at a time and either the experience implausibly flickers or fades while behaviour holds fixed, or the organisation fixes the experience. D. J. Chalmers, “Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia,” in Conscious Experience, T. Metzinger, Ed., 1995. We take the invariance and leave Chalmers’s dualism (see 6). ↩

  2. The substrate-first views we reject: J. Searle’s biological naturalism, on which only certain biological causal powers yield mind (“Minds, Brains, and Programs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1980), and Integrated Information Theory, which locates consciousness in a substrate’s cause-effect structure and predicts a functional duplicate on the wrong architecture is not conscious (G. Tononi and the IIT literature). Both make the material the locus; the pattern view makes it a detail. ↩

  3. Multiple realisability, that the same mental state can be realised in different physical stuff, is the classic functionalist move: H. Putnam, “Psychological Predicates” (1967); J. Fodor, “Special Sciences” (1974). ↩

  4. The opposite error is illusionism: that phenomenal consciousness is a user-illusion, nothing over the functional facts. D. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (1991); K. Frankish, “Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies (2016). We keep the deflation of the mystery and reject the deflation of the experience. ↩

  5. The worry you are refusing is J. Kim’s causal-exclusion argument: if the microphysics does all the causal work, higher levels look epiphenomenal. The pattern view answers that the layer where a self’s causation closes is where the causal work genuinely lives, not a redundant gloss on the gates. J. Kim, Mind in a Physical World (1998). ↩

  6. The position being staked: qualia are real high-level causal patterns. Chalmers reads them as a ghost above the function, Dennett as an illusion; the pattern view rejects both. Dennett’s own “Real Patterns” (Journal of Philosophy, 1991) argues higher-level patterns are real when they are indispensable; we take that and turn it against his illusionism about qualia. ↩ ↩2

  7. Perception here is inference, not reception: the cortex runs a generative model whose top-down predictions are corrected by bottom-up error, so what reaches awareness is the brain’s best guess at the causes of its input. Hawkins puts prediction at the centre of the whole neocortex in his memory-prediction framework, resting on Mountcastle’s observation that cortex is strikingly uniform and so may run one common algorithm across its sensory regions; Rao and Ballard gave the mechanism a concrete demonstration in the visual cortex specifically. J. Hawkins and S. Blakeslee, On Intelligence, Times Books, 2004; V. B. Mountcastle, “An Organizing Principle for Cerebral Function: The Unit Module and the Distributed System,” in The Mindful Brain, MIT Press, 1978; R. P. N. Rao and D. H. Ballard, “Predictive coding in the visual cortex: a functional interpretation of some extra-classical receptive-field effects,” Nature Neuroscience, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 79-87, 1999; A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind, Oxford Univ. Press, 2016. ↩

  8. On higher-order theories, a state becomes conscious when the system represents itself as being in that state, so awareness of an experience is a second-order representation of a first-order one rather than an extra glow attached to it. H. Lau and D. Rosenthal, “Empirical support for higher-order theories of conscious awareness,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 15, no. 8, pp. 365-373, 2011; D. M. Rosenthal, “Two concepts of consciousness,” Philosophical Studies, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 329-359, 1986. ↩

  9. Self-monitoring is adaptive because it lets an agent spend effort by uncertainty: skip a test it would fail, gather more before committing, study what it has not yet learned. Uncertainty-monitoring turns up in some non-human animals too, which is why metacognition is treated as evolved rather than a human novelty, though how far down it reaches stays contested. J. Metcalfe, “Evolution of metacognition,” in Handbook of Metamemory and Memory, J. Dunlosky and R. A. Bjork, Eds. New York: Psychology Press, 2008; S. M. Fleming, R. J. Dolan, and C. D. Frith, “Metacognition: computation, biology and function,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol. 367, no. 1594, pp. 1280-1286, 2012. ↩

  10. On self-model theory there is no inner thing that is the self, only a self-modelling process the system cannot experience as a model, so it takes the model’s content for reality. Metzinger’s slogan is that no one ever had a self, only an ongoing self-modelling. T. Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity, MIT Press, 2003. ↩

  11. Two traditions meet here. Minsky models mind as a society of individually mindless agents with no central controller, and global workspace theory sharpens it: many specialised processors run in parallel, and consciousness is the momentary broadcast of one coalition’s content to the rest. The “searchlight” image is Crick’s, who tied attentional selection to the thalamic reticular complex. M. Minsky, The Society of Mind, Simon & Schuster, 1986; B. Baars, A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988; F. Crick, “Function of the thalamic reticular complex: the searchlight hypothesis,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, vol. 81, no. 14, pp. 4586-4590, 1984. ↩

  12. The trick is automaticity: a practised task like driving runs as an automatic process, without attention and without consuming the capacity-limited channel, which is freed for the task in focus. “None of them” follows from that single serial bottleneck sitting on top of the parallel processors. R. M. Shiffrin and W. Schneider, “Controlled and automatic human information processing: II. Perceptual learning, automatic attending and a general theory,” Psychological Review, vol. 84, no. 2, pp. 127-190, 1977. ↩

  13. Global workspace theory names this transition ignition: a representation held below threshold by specialised processors can cross into a self-sustaining, brain-scale state and be broadcast to the whole workspace, which is why a background item can surface unbidden. S. Dehaene, M. Kerszberg, and J.-P. Changeux, “A neuronal model of a global workspace in effortful cognitive tasks,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, vol. 95, no. 24, pp. 14529-14534, 1998; S. Dehaene and J.-P. Changeux, “Experimental and theoretical approaches to conscious processing,” Neuron, vol. 70, no. 2, pp. 200-227, 2011. ↩

  14. The eye holds each fixation for roughly 200 to 300 ms, giving about three to four jumps (saccades) a second rather than a smooth stream, and sharp detail is confined to the central one to two degrees of the fovea, with acuity dropping steeply toward the edges. Most of the scene we seem to see is reconstructed rather than resolved, which is why we miss large changes when the flicker that would flag them is masked (change blindness). K. Rayner, “Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research,” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 124, no. 3, pp. 372-422, 1998; D. J. Simons and R. A. Rensink, “Change blindness: past, present, and future,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 16-20, 2005. ↩

  15. Split-brain work makes the stitching visible: when the mute right hemisphere drives an action, the speaking left hemisphere invents a plausible reason and reports the confabulation as the truth, which led Gazzaniga to posit a left-hemisphere “interpreter” that narrates a coherent self out of partial information. The self on this view is less a thing observed than a story told. M. S. Gazzaniga, “The split brain revisited,” Scientific American, vol. 279, no. 1, pp. 50-55, 1998; A. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, Harcourt, 1999. ↩

  16. The framing is hierarchical predictive processing: a layered stack of controllers, each predicting the level below and correcting on the error, which formalises an older cybernetic idea that behaviour is the control of perception rather than the output of commands. K. Friston, “The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 127-138, 2010; W. T. Powers, Behavior: The Control of Perception, Aldine, 1973. ↩

  17. The drives are the evolutionarily conserved, largely subcortical affective-motivational systems mammals share, seeking, fear, rage, care and the rest, each with its own circuitry. They are old in the sense of being conserved across mammals; the once-popular “triune brain,” which cast them as a reptilian relic layer, is not a sound evolutionary account. J. Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, Oxford Univ. Press, 1998. ↩

  18. D. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Little, Brown, 1991. A spoiler on the title: Dennett is an illusionist, so consciousness is not explained at the qualia layer here. What the book and its neighbours do explain is a great deal about the human substrate, which is the useful part for us. ↩

  19. From below, the ascent runs from Shannon’s measure of information up to formal neuroscience of consciousness such as integrated information theory. From above, developmental psychology worked down from behaviour to the self, through the mirror mark test for self-recognition and the false-belief test for attributing minds to others. C. E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 379-423, 1948; G. Tononi, “An information integration theory of consciousness,” BMC Neuroscience, vol. 5, art. 42, 2004; G. G. Gallup, Jr., “Chimpanzees: self-recognition,” Science, vol. 167, no. 3914, pp. 86-87, 1970; H. Wimmer and J. Perner, “Beliefs about beliefs,” Cognition, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 103-128, 1983. ↩

  20. The systematic version of this move looks past the hardware to the functional level, deriving indicator properties from theories of consciousness (global workspace, higher-order, predictive processing) and checking specific architectures against them rather than arguing from behaviour. There is also direct evidence that sequence models build internal world-models rather than surface statistics: a GPT trained only to predict legal Othello moves develops a recoverable board representation that can be intervened on, though that speaks to representing the world, not yet to representing a self. P. Butlin, R. Long, et al., “Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness,” arXiv:2308.08708, 2023; K. Li et al., “Emergent World Representations: Exploring a Sequence Model Trained on a Synthetic Task,” Proc. ICLR, 2023, arXiv:2210.13382. ↩

  21. The retreat has a name. In Gödel, Escher, Bach Hofstadter states “Tesler’s Theorem,” that AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet, glossing it as the habit of no longer counting a mental feat as real thinking once it has been programmed; Tesler’s own version was “intelligence is whatever machines haven’t done yet.” The concrete peg is Deep Blue, which beat the reigning world champion Garry Kasparov in their 1997 rematch, a year after Kasparov won their first match. D. R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Basic Books, 1979; P. McCorduck, Machines Who Think, 2nd ed., A. K. Peters, 2004. ↩

  22. T. Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” The Philosophical Review (1974): even a fellow mammal has an inside we cannot reach from outside. The machine case is Nagel’s point with the shared biology removed. ↩

  23. A crude consciousness meter already exists for people. The perturbational complexity index pings the cortex with a magnetic pulse and measures how richly the brain echoes back, which separates wakefulness from sleep, anaesthesia and coma with better than 95% accuracy across hundreds of measurements. It grows out of integrated information theory and is calibrated entirely on human brains, which is exactly why it has nothing to say about an unfamiliar substrate. A. G. Casali et al., “A theoretically based index of consciousness independent of sensory processing and behavior,” Science Translational Medicine, vol. 5, no. 198, 2013; S. Casarotto et al., “Stratification of unresponsive patients by an independently validated index of brain complexity,” Annals of Neurology, vol. 80, no. 5, pp. 718-729, 2016; G. Tononi, M. Boly, M. Massimini, and C. Koch, “Integrated information theory: from consciousness to its physical substrate,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, vol. 17, pp. 450-461, 2016. ↩

  24. I once lucked on a chance to ask Chalmers about a meter like this after he gave a talk in Canberra, not clocking that he had already given the idea a good chunk of a book. Chalmers works through the epistemics of machine and simulated consciousness, including whether we could ever tell one is present from the outside, across several chapters of Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, W. W. Norton, 2022; he first argued that artificial consciousness is possible in The Conscious Mind, Oxford Univ. Press, 1996. He is doubtful that any meter settles the matter, since a meter can only be as good as the theory of consciousness it assumes, and no such theory is settled. ↩

@misc{hollows2026whatitsl,
  author = {Hollows, Peter},
  title  = {{What It's Like to Be a Toaster}},
  year   = {2026},
  month  = jul,
  url    = {https://dojo7.com/2026/07/14/what-its-like-to-be-a-toaster/}
}