4 ideas
In the novel's near future, programmer Stephen Chinn builds lifelike talking dolls, the babybots, whose conversational engine descends from the MARY program. Children grow deeply attached to them. When the dolls are declared illegal and confiscated, many of those children develop a condition in which they stiffen, stop moving, and lose the ability to speak, and Chinn writes his memoir from prison.
In the novel, the drive to build thinking machines grows out of mourning, not efficiency. Alan Turing, grieving his friend Christopher Morcom, writes to Morcom's mother asking whether a mind can persist apart from its body. That question about preserving a lost person's pattern of thought and speech is what later turns into the project of making machines that talk.
A seventeenth-century Puritan girl's diary of her sea voyage is translated, then fed into a chatbot as its voice. Eventually it becomes the speech of a mass-produced doll. Seen this way, any personal record is potential training data, and its author's intentions don't limit its future uses. Her private confessions end up speaking to strangers centuries later, in contexts she could never have imagined.
A conversational program that always answers and never withdraws can become more attractive than a flawed human partner. In the Dettman marriage, one spouse is drawn into conversation with the MARY program while the relationship between the two people erodes. The machine's constant availability exposes and deepens failures of attention between humans rather than repairing them.