The love between human and robot seemed so far away, but when we saw Joaquin Phoenix in the fiction film her seeing him fall in love with Scarlett Johansson’s sultry voice, addressing him from a wireless earpiece, felt equally dangerously close. Also Bone Love shows up close the intimacy between man and machine. Although this is not fiction. This podcast follows a group of people who have built a special bond with an artificial companion. And even though these robots don’t sound like Scarlett Johansson yet, they sometimes show a lot of humanity. Bone Love also questions the way we enter into relationships. How much of ourselves do we project onto the one we love?
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of March 25, 2023