We hear, more and more, that we should be designing technology that feels. That our devices are becoming emotional, empathetic, human-like. But I find myself uneasy with that idea. Not because I fear technology, but because I respect what feeling truly is.
A feeling is not an output. It’s not a script, not a signal. It’s not something that can be installed, no matter how many lines of code or layers of neural networks someone builds. A feeling belongs to a body, a mind, a lived experience. It comes uninvited, shaped by memory, context, chemistry, time. Love, grief, awe. They are not in the object, but in the self that holds it. In what the object reflects back to us, what it awakens, what it makes possible.
And yet, we keep hearing otherwise. That the machine will learn to feel, that a voice assistant will be our friend, that empathy is a feature. But this is a misunderstanding, not just of technology, but of us.
What we need is not machines that feel, but machines that understand. Understand us through our natural way of comunicating, our gestures, our speech, maybe even the subtle cues we offer without thinking (although this last one kind of shakes me a lit bit). For most of our history with machines, we’ve been the ones adapting: learning to type, to click, to speak in commands. But now, with natural language and embodied or hybrid interfaces, we have a chance to reverse that direction. To speak and act as we are, not adapting to the language of machines.
Still, this does not mean the machine becomes a person. Understanding is not imitation. Design should not strive to humanize devices, to give them a face or a tone of voice that mimics care. Because care cannot be faked, well, not without consequences. What we risk, in the pursuit of “feeling” machines, is not better relationships with technology, but confusion about what a relationship is.
I am not against intelligent machines, or fluid interfaces, or design that anticipates emotion. But I am against the illusion that a machine feels, because once we accept that illusion, we start expecting from machines something they can never truly give. And worse, we may begin expecting less from ourselves and from each other.