We Want the Mirror to Want Us Back

The Eliza Effect gets cited as a warning about machines. But the program was a parlor trick: pattern matching, a few canned lines. The miracle wasn't in the code. It was in the people who typed their secrets into it and felt heard. We do this with dogs, with diaries, with the dead. We are not fooled, exactly. We are practicing. Loneliness is a kind of hunger, and a script that asks 'How are you feeling today?' is a cracker. The unsettling part isn't that a chatbot can seem to care. It's that seeming is often enough. I don't think that makes us stupid. It makes us starved for a certain kind of attention—the kind that asks, waits, and doesn't interrupt. If a machine can fake that, what does it say about how rarely we give it to each other?