I remember when I first engaged the Commodore 64’s voice synthesis software, a function built-in to what was truly an impressive BASIC foundation. With some clever, intentional misspellings and exaggerated grammatical misgivings, the voice synthesizer could be made to sounds fairly reasonable, and most certainly understandable. This was in the early 1980s.

While this was by no means anything resembling artificial intelligence and not even a precursor to machine learning, it was simply fun. I had disassembled a land line (the only kind of line at that time) hand receiver and wired the speaker jack of my C-64 directly into the phone. In this manner, I could both dial phone numbers (and generate pink noise, Tassie locking frequencies, and otherwise reserved operator functions) and then order take-out pizza by means of my keyboard. Assuming the person receiving the call was willing to send a pizza based upon an order by a voice that was something of a blend of the Terminator and Max Headroom without the stutter, the pizza arrived thirty minutes later.

It was good, clean fun. Admittedly, we all dreamed of a day when we really could talk to our computers and the myriad devices they would control. In the ’90s MIT’s Nicholas Negropante wrote and spoke of a magical future in which humans and machines cohabitate working and living spaces—cars, offices, kitchens, bedrooms, our homes. In those shared environments the machines are employed to relieve us of mundane tasks, to assist those who do not possess a full range of motion, and by the very nature of the interface, invoke joy for the capacity of human creativity to invent such profound assistants.

Some thirty years later, we are riding an evolutionary wave of improved computer and robotic assistants. Siri, Alexa, Erica, and other female facsimiles are available to do our bidding. For now, their range of functions are limited to digital media: phone calls, written messages, and playing music we didn’t even know was our favorite.

At the outset of this digital assistant revolution I was excited to see the fruition of my experiment as a teenager. But soon thereafter I recognized something more profound—the very thing we wanted was eluding us, more out of reach than when we started.

We are a social animal. We are a creature that has evolved to depend on other humans for our well being. Even when we crave time alone it is through direct, face-to-face, skin-to-skin contact that we find a sense of belonging.

When I was a kid and made my first phone call using my home computer (and the pizza arrived), I had unknowingly inserted a gap between myself and the person I would have come to know at the pizza delivery service. I missed an opportunity for connection, replacing human contact with a machine interface.

That simple function is now exacerbated to such a high degree that an entire generation has grown up without knowing how to communicate face-to-face, alienated by the very function of speaking to another human. What is it that invokes satisfaction when a machine does our work for us? What joy do we experience in not doing something for ourselves? And is the joy of employing a digital assistant greater than that of moving our own bodies, of the tactile feedback of physically engaging the world around us?

I recently received a text message from a friend that read, “Sounds good safe travels and is this who is this who is this who is this who is”. A bit perplexed by this repeating phrase, the next message clarified, “Sorry my Siri was on [and] I just realized it was taping [what] my radio was saying”.