Four books on this: The Second Self (1985) Alone Together (2011) Love and Sex with Robots (2008) You are Not A Gadget (2011) I've read two and a half of those. Here's the short answer: We have evolved to communicate as equals. If the communication is imperfect, we "fill in the gaps" with our own experience so that we continue to communicate as equals. This is why we have pets. Once we have affinity for an animal, we anthropomorphize our experience with pets by assigning them motives, beliefs and behaviors out of our own psyche. With animals, there is the same basic risk/reward/response framework, particularly as we favor mammals as pets. Things go wrong with gadgets because there is no risk/reward/response framework. When a human is presented with the scant responses of a machine, the human works overtime to assign human overtones to the machine in order to relate in a comfortable, familiar way. It fucks us up. I wholeheartedly recommend Alone Together. Just read this much and see if you agree.