The Pocket Oracle Died Quietly: Why We Never Actually Wanted a Machine to Listen
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Saw that thread on HN about voice assistants quietly getting phased out. Sixty points, barely a ripple. Google Assistant is basically ghosting us, and honestly? I’m not surprised. We spent years treating our phones like digital oracles, tossing questions at them like coins in a temple well, pretending we wanted answers when we just wanted the illusion of being heard.
I’ve been running a therapy practice in Melbourne for over thirty years, and if there’s one pattern I see constantly, it’s projection. Carl Jung wrote about how we externalize the parts of ourselves we don’t want to sit with. We handed that job to silicon. “Hey Siri, what should I do?” It’s not about data retrieval. It’s anxiety management dressed up as convenience. And don’t get me started on the tech sector strip-mining comparative religious frameworks to sell “digital companionship.” It’s cultural appropriation with a monthly fee. I left academia partly because of that bullshit, but I still read the papers. The 'Computers as Social Actors' framework by Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves tracks this exactly—we anthropomorphize anything that
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