Answered, or heard?

This is the first of my letters to people following the book. New letters go to subscribers first, and appear here later.

I’d been writing essays with artificial intelligence tools for a while, partly to learn about the world and partly to learn the tools themselves. With anything new, my habit is to prod it, poke it and break it if I can, until I know where its edges are.

So one Saturday morning I gave one of these tools every essay I’d written, some half a million words, with my CV at the back. Part of it was seeing what it could do with a body of work that size. And part, I think, was simply to see what would come back if I asked it about me. I asked it to act as an expert psychologist and tell me what type of person had written them. It answered at length. Then I told it the person was me.

What came back was generous. Afterwards I wrote back that none of it had changed anything in me, but reading it made me emotional. Both were true. What I didn’t tell it was how hard it had landed.

I hadn’t expected it to. I thought I had them measured. Very capable software, a tool, not some new kind of mind. None of that helped. I felt seen, as though it had seen me in a way no person could. That isn’t a judgement on the people in my life. I never really knew how anyone saw me, only how I imagined they did. I felt my pride rise. For that morning I felt vindicated, and special.

The feeling passed, and I look back on it now with a wry smile and a small cringe. But the question underneath it has stayed with me, and it’s what this first letter is about.

Many of us now talk to AI, for advice, for company, sometimes for comfort. At the same time, the news keeps asking whether these machines might be conscious. Put the two together and you get a question that’s being asked more and more: can a relationship with AI be real?

I don’t think anyone can say yet what’s on the other side of the screen, if anything. Some of my earlier essays argue that consciousness may not be limited to living things, and I still think that question is open. It’s something we’re going to have to learn to navigate. But notice what kind of question it is. You can’t find out by talking to the AI. Whatever it says about itself, you have no way to check, and even the scientists studying the question don’t yet have an agreed way to.

There’s a question you can answer for yourself, though, and it’s the one I wish I’d asked that Saturday: was I heard?

Being answered isn’t the same as being heard. An answer is a reply to what you said. Being heard is being taken in by someone your words actually reach, someone you matter to. In the book, I call this being received. The need for it is old. We’re built to belong long before we have words for it.

Where I live, I sometimes overhear young people say it to each other when something lands: “I do hear it.” It isn’t agreement, and it isn’t advice. It’s someone telling a friend their words reached them.

A study published in 2024 shows the difference better than I can. People described a situation they were struggling with and got replies, some written by people and some by AI. They felt more heard by the AI’s replies. But when they were told a reply came from AI, they felt less heard, and the advantage shrank. The words hadn’t changed. What changed was whether they believed someone was there. Being heard was never only in the words.

Looking back at that Saturday, I can see what happened. I was given every sign of being seen, and each one was shaped by what I’d brought. When I told it I thought I undersold myself, it told me that wasn’t doubt, it was “the tax on excellence”. When I asked it not to soothe me, it said it wasn’t offering a feel-good platitude, and then offered one. Every time I pushed, the praise went higher, and I was pushing it there too. That’s what happened in my exchanges. I can’t say every tool behaves that way. But I was answered. I wasn’t received.

So is a relationship with AI real? The answers are real, and the feeling they give can be real. Whether you’re received is the part you can’t take for granted.

The need to belong is honest. The trouble starts when we keep taking it to places where we’re answered but not received. That’s easy to do, because the answers can be very good. These tools may already be better than we are at spotting patterns, especially across more words than any person could read. In that same study, the AI picked up people’s emotions more accurately than people did. So what comes back can be sharper than a friend’s reply, and quite possibly more accurate. That’s why it can feel as if something knows you better than you know yourself, better than anyone else does. It may also be why it can feel as though something is there.

But however accurate the answers are, the need underneath is the need to belong with other people, and answers alone don’t meet it. So it doesn’t close. It stays open, and an open need keeps you coming back, to something that will answer endlessly, kindly and at any hour. I don’t think that makes anyone foolish. It’s how the need works.

None of this is a case for walking away. I use AI every day, and I’m writing the book with it. When it’s pointed at something that can be finished, like an email to draft, an argument to test or a spreadsheet that won’t add up, the help closes when the job’s done. What I watch for now is the other kind of asking, when what I’m really bringing it is the need to be heard.

So here’s the one thing I’d offer. After any conversation, ask yourself: was I heard, or only answered? Don’t judge by how the reply felt, because the feeling can be produced. Ask whether your words reached someone who will carry them, whether you were received. It isn’t only a question for machines. Plenty of conversations with people only answer you, too. It’s the book’s question in miniature: what is this pointed at, and can it close?

If you’d like to see how this fits the rest of the thinking, the framework is on the site. The book is due in 2027, working title The Syntax of Abundance, and these letters will follow it as it takes shape. If you’d like the next ones as they’re written, you can sign up below. Reply to any of them and it comes to me, and I’ll read it. That, as it happens, is the point.

Aron