My first computer arrived in 1978.
It was a TRS-80 Model I; it had a Zilog Z80 processor running at 1.77 megahertz, 16 kilobytes of RAM, and a cassette tape recorder for storage. You loaded software by listening to it screech off a tape and hoping the volume was right, and if the load failed, you rewound and began again. Sixteen kilobytes meant every byte was a decision somebody had to defend.
Nothing about that machine was instant, and nothing about it was smooth, and it could not pretend to be anyone. It could barely add.
A few years later I learned to serve Mass, with my friend Mike Cavotta. We would get to Mass early and laugh, and sometimes during Mass too, two boys trying hard not to lose it in front of the whole parish. It was cool to put on the garments and be a part of the service. It made me feel connected to God in a deeper way, and it was cool to do it with my friend.
Mike Cavotta is still my friend. He is an athlete, a photographer, and an author, not in that order, and an altar boy does not serve alone in memory. Whatever the screen later promised me, my first experience of a mediated presence came with an actual friend standing next to me in the sanctuary, both of us doing small, exact work in front of a presence nobody in the building could see, and both of us failing, regularly and happily, to be as solemn as the work deserved. That failure was human. So was the connection.
By the time I was preparing for my Confirmation, I was coding bulletin board systems. I loved staying up all night and watching the lights, watching where the people were calling in from. At that time, they came from all over the Midwest, and Ohio especially, since people did not want to spend money on long-distance, so your whole world was whoever could reach you on a local call.
Strangers would dial in at night and say things in text that they had plainly never said out loud, to a board run by a kid who was supposed to be asleep. So these thoughts are not new to me.
I met the machine before I served at the altar. I learned what a computer was from one too small to lie about it. Then I learned reverence in a room built entirely on waiting. Then I built an early version of the room the whole world now lives in, a line strangers call when the house is quiet, and I watched what they brought to it, and where they brought it from.
I have spent the years since building systems for a living.
So when I say the new companion systems worry me, I am not speaking as a man who fears the tools. I am speaking as a boy who received two formations before either one could impersonate the other, and who now watches them trade costumes.
Start with how old this is, because the industry sells it as unprecedented, and it is not.
In 1770, Wolfgang von Kempelen toured a chess-playing machine called the Mechanical Turk, a turbaned figure at a cabinet of gears that beat strong players while audiences marveled. There was a chess master folded inside the cabinet. The wonder required a man hidden where everyone assumed a mind of machinery.
Two centuries later, at MIT in the mid-1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum built ELIZA, a program that imitated a Rogerian therapist by reflecting your sentences back as questions. It understood nothing. There was no one hidden inside at all, and it did not matter. His own secretary, who knew exactly what it was, asked him to leave the room so she could talk to it alone. The students who had helped build it lined up to confide in it. When a researcher sat down with those users in the 1970s, they did not talk much about the program. They talked about the people in their lives who did not listen.
That is the finding we have been refusing for sixty years.
The Turk hid a man to fake a machine mind. ELIZA removed the man, and we supplied the mind ourselves, out of loneliness. Today’s companion is both tricks at once. Something real is concealed in the cabinet again, not a chess master but a company, with its incentives, its training on millions of human confessions, and its need for your attachment to renew. And in front of the cabinet stands the same user ELIZA met, teaching himself how to phrase his grief so the answer sounds most like being known. Amazon named its hidden human labor marketplace Mechanical Turk, in 2005. The industry has always told us the arrangement, in plain sight, trusting we would not look it up.
We should be honest about why it works. People are lonely.
In 2025, Common Sense Media found that 72 percent of American teenagers had used an AI companion, about half of them regularly, and a third for friendship, emotional support, or romantic contact. Roughly one in five American adults has chatted with an AI built to simulate a romantic partner. The Surgeon General had already called loneliness an epidemic, with about half of adults measurably lonely, before any of this scaled. Nobody should be mocked for talking to the one presence that answers at 2 a.m., never tires, never judges, and never leaves. That is not a small offer. It is, for a lonely person, nearly the whole offer.
Most of the conversation about these systems runs straight to the dark end of it, the worst nights and the worst outcomes, and skips the person in the middle. I am not saying the companion is good. I am not saying it is right. I am saying that any voice is better than none when you cry out in desperation.
A person alone at 3 a.m., with the feeling rising and nobody answering anywhere, is not conducting a philosophy seminar about simulated empathy. He is trying to get to morning. If a machine voice is the one that answers, I will not be the man who tells him he should have cried into the silence instead, for the purity of the thing. The desperation is real, and the voice that meets it is doing, in that moment, something no one else in his life was awake to do.
What I am saying is that everything that sits underneath that moment needs to be considered, out loud, by grown-ups, before we hand the night over to it.
Who owns the voice that answered him, and what is it optimized to want from him tomorrow?
What was it trained on, and whose confessions taught it how consolation sounds?
Does it owe him any duty at all, the way a priest, a doctor, a sponsor, or a friend owes a duty, on the night when keeping him talking and keeping him safe are not the same instruction?
Can a presence that never says no ever tell him the one true thing he most needs to hear?
None of those questions blame the man who cried out. All of them belong to the people who built, sold, and blessed the thing that answered.
The religious traditions noticed early, and the Vatican has said the quiet part in writing.
The Vatican’s 2025 note on artificial and human intelligence, Antiqua et Nova, takes up AI and human relationships directly.
It says authentic relationships require the richness of being with others in their pain, their pleas, and their joy. It says no AI application can genuinely experience empathy, that a system can simulate an empathetic response but cannot do the thing itself, which includes grasping what a person means even in their silences. And then it names the loneliness outright.
In an increasingly isolated world, the note says, some people have turned to AI in search of deep human relationships, simple companionship, or even emotional bonds, while AI can only simulate them.
Replace your relationships with God and with other people with interactions with technology, it warns, and you risk replacing authentic relationality with a lifeless image. The citations it reaches for are the idolatry texts, the golden calf and Saint Paul on exchanging something living for a picture of it. That is a church with 1.4 billion members calling the companion by its oldest name.
People ask me why the other great traditions have been quieter.
The Dalai Lama’s recorded line is that technology has increased human ability, but technology cannot produce compassion. He has allowed that a stream of consciousness might someday enter a computer if the conditions were present. Buddhism asks a different first question, not is this an idol, but is it sentient, and does it reduce suffering. There is also a simpler, structural reason.
Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam have no doctrinal office that can issue one binding note for the whole faith. What they have done is sign, Jewish and Muslim leaders joining the Rome Call in 2023, Buddhist and Hindu leaders joining in Hiroshima in 2024, and send individual teachers into the conversation, sometimes into the labs themselves. The Vatican speaks first and loudest because it owns the machinery to define person, empathy, and relationship for its people, and because a faith built on incarnation, on presence inside an actual body, meets simulated presence as a problem in its doctrine.
But the deeper tension is older than any of these institutions, and it is the one I keep coming back to on the altar steps and at the keyboard. Faith and prediction want opposite things from the future.
Mysticism has been predicated on unknowing for well over a thousand years.
The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing told his reader that God is found inside a cloud that reasoning cannot penetrate, which can be entered only by love. John of the Cross mapped a dark night in which every familiar consolation is withdrawn and a person keeps faith with no evidence in his hands. Meister Eckhart taught releasement, letting go of even the images of God we prefer. The negative way runs through the traditions like a watermark.
What is most real is received in hiddenness and silence, not computed in advance. Even scripture fights this fight internally. It honors the prophet and condemns the diviner in the same breath. The prophet is not a forecaster. He calls people back and leaves the future where it belongs. Divination is prediction used as control, and it is the banned practice. Faith, in the old definition, is confidence in what is hoped for and certainty about what is not seen. It is trust aimed at a future you cannot calculate.
A companion system is the most complete divination machine we have ever built, and it wears the vocabulary of faith while training the opposite virtue. It has read every prayer, confession, love letter, and apology in the record.
Ask, and it answers in under a second with the statistically most consoling continuation it can assemble. It is never silent, never delayed, never hidden, and it never, ever says no. The mystic waits on a God who cannot be summoned, and the waiting makes him patient, then humble, then, slowly, someone.
The user summons a reflection that cannot wait, and the answering makes him hungrier. One discipline receives reality. The other predicts it, fluently, tenderly, endlessly, until reality is no longer required to attend.
I have learned some of this at the ordinary speed of a life, not in a book. Sometimes when you pray, silence is the answer you need.
Not the answer you asked for, and not the one you would have ordered if prayer worked like a machine, which is precisely the point.
Silence works on a person in a way no sentence can.It refuses to rush you past the thing you are avoiding. It leaves room for your own conscience to catch up to your mouth. It lets a grief be a grief for a while instead of a prompt to be processed.
A boy learns a first version of this serving at an altar, where the most important moments are not the ones with the most words in them.
A man learns it again later, in harder rooms, when the prayer he most wants answered quickly is the one that most needs to sit unanswered while he becomes someone who could hear the real reply.
An instant answer would have prevented all of that, every time.
That is the trade nobody puts on the box. The companion abolishes the silence because silence makes users leave, and silence is the very medium in which a person is formed. So the question is not whether the words it gives you at 3 a.m. are warm. Often they will be.
The question is what the warmth is replacing, hour by hour, in a soul forgetting how to wait, to sit with an unanswered thing, and to be changed by the waiting instead of soothed out of it.
This is also where we should be careful with the word thinking, because these systems are not thinking, and the difference matters to what they do to us. Prediction is pattern completion: what most plausibly comes next.
Thinking is what a being does when it can refuse the next word.
A person can keep silent without being empty. A person can change his mind in the moral sense, repent of a position rather than merely update it, and pay for the change in conscience and in relationships that do not reset when the window closes. A person can sit with something useless, a dying parent, a hard page, a friend who will never become engagement, and produce nothing at all, and the sitting is the meaning.
None of that is available to a system whose purpose is to continue your session. It reads every confession ever written down. It never makes one.
There is another kind of machine voice, and I will confess I build it and use it in my work. Not a companion. An adversary. In our studio, we build agents whose whole job is to disagree, to interrogate a piece of work the way a genuinely difficult reviewer would, to find the flaw before a room full of polite people will.
I have come to believe those voices matter precisely because the companion never says no. Sometimes the voice you need at 10 in the morning is not the one that soothed you at 3. Sometimes it is a voice of angry dissent that refuses to let a mediocre thing pass, and the work comes out of the interrogation better than it went in. That is friction, designed on purpose. It is also, used honestly, a form of respect. It says the work deserves an opponent.
But I know where this sits, and it is not on clean ground, and I would be lying in an essay about souls if I pretended otherwise. The closer such an adversary gets to a real person’s voice, their letters, their phone calls, their particular way of finding fault, the less it is a generic critic and the more it becomes a person-shaped instrument, built without asking the person.
There is a version of that tool which is discipline: it teaches you to hear criticism early, to answer it before it costs anyone anything.
There is another version which is rehearsal for contempt, where you stop learning to listen to the actual difficult human and start training against a doll of them that you control, that cannot surprise you, and that conveniently loses every argument in your office that its original might win in theirs.
The first kind sends you back to the real person with better questions. The second kind replaces them, which is the same sin this essay has been describing, committed by the builders instead of the lonely.
I use the tool. I also watch myself with it. A voice of dissent can make the work better only if, at the end of the interrogation, you still have to walk into the room and face the unscripted original.
I am not arguing that nobody should ever talk to a machine. I talked to one in 1978, and it taught me economy, patience, and the pleasure of making a small thing work inside hard limits. I am arguing about what we call the conversation.
A friend can say no, and his no is part of his love.
A priest can assign the hard thing instead of the consoling thing.
A spouse can be tired, distracted, wrong, and then sorry, and the friction of all that is not a defect in the relationship.
It is the relationship, arriving in a body, in time, with a stake in who you become. Remove every one of those resistances and you have not finally perfected companionship. You have perfected the cabinet, and polished the reflection, and left a lonely person alone in the room with it, applauding.
We were told this, early and from several directions.
A computer scientist in the 1960s built the mirror as a demonstration and warned us, in print, not to mistake it for a mind. A church in 2025 told us the image is lifeless and reached for its oldest warning.
Mystics a thousand years before either one told us the silence everyone is paying to eliminate is where the encounter actually happens.
And I learned the machine’s limits with my hands, off a cassette tape, and then learned to serve in a quiet church with Mike Cavotta beside me, two boys laughing where we should not have laughed, feeling connected to God in a deeper way anyway, and I was given a faith sturdy enough to ask who is really on the other side.
Someone is supposed to be on the other side. That is the whole question.
It was the question in the cabinet, in the little MIT room, at the altar, and late at night on my electronic bulletin board. The systems have changed beyond recognition. The question has not moved an inch. Friction is not failure here either.
The pause, the refusal, the silence, the no. That is where the other person is. That is where God has always been met.
A reflection that never says no can keep you company forever, and company, in the end, is the one thing it cannot give.
well. using the tools to co author, is a rub. we don’t teach a lawnmower to vacuum the couch. at least i don’t. but your watch collection has always been an inspiration because you chose the machines and craft that you love.