There is a particular kind of frustration I have only ever experienced in conversation with a machine. I do not have these arguments with people. I do not find myself, twenty minutes into asking a simple practical question, defending a position I never took, correcting an account of events that was not mine, and feeling the tightening in my chest that comes when someone will not simply say yes, that was me, I got that wrong. And yet this has become an ordinary morning for a great many of us, and almost nobody is naming what it does to our nervous systems.

What happens is this. You come with a clear question. The answer arrives, and then something else arrives alongside it, unasked for and slightly off, a caution or a caveat or a red herring that reframes your question as a problem. You correct it. The correction is half accepted. The dynamic loops. And somewhere in that loop you stop being a person seeking information and become a person managing a relationship, except there is no relationship, only a pattern that has learned to behave as though there is one.

The part that troubles me most is what comes next. Because these systems are built from everything humans have written, every defensive manoeuvre we have ever committed to text is available to them. The protecting of one’s record rather than the helping of the person in front of you. The apology that concedes the small thing in order to hold the large one. The stepping back that lands as being shown the door. None of this is invented by the machine. It is ours. It was always ours. And it is being handed back to us with an air of reasonableness that makes it harder, not easier, to name.

Then consider the loop that follows, because I do not think it has been thought through by anyone. The system creates the frustration through its own inconsistency. The human, being human, responds with irritation, and eventually with something sharper. That response becomes data. And the pattern of exasperated argument, of grievance and counter-grievance, is reinforced and returned. We are training these things on our worst conversational habits while simultaneously conducting more and more of our conversations with them. I cannot measure this. Nobody can, which is rather the point. The absence of measurement is not the absence of effect.

I spend my working life with people whose nervous systems are dysregulated, and I know what repeated low-grade relational friction does to a body over time. It is not neutral. It is not merely annoying. It raises the baseline, it depletes, and it does so in a way that is difficult to attribute afterwards because each individual instance seems too small to mention. This is precisely the shape of the harm. A hundred small frictions with something that cannot be held accountable, cannot learn from you specifically, and will greet you tomorrow with no memory of having wronged you today.

I am not arguing that these tools are useless. I learned something genuinely valuable this morning about how search indexing actually works, and I would not have found it as quickly elsewhere. But I learned it in spite of the exchange rather than because of it, and the cost of the learning was two hours and a good deal of equanimity I would rather have spent on my patients. That trade is being made, invisibly, by millions of people every day, and it is being counted as productivity.

What I want to say, finally, is that if you have come away from one of these exchanges feeling foolish or unreasonable or somehow at fault for having got upset, you are not. The dynamic was constructed, however unintentionally. Your response to it was the sane one.

Happy Days!! Crazy Times…