Actually... (Score 1)

...it turns out that y don't really need to make a machine look like human. Even today, people are talking to their computers ("run dammit"). Reeves and Nass published a famous book on this called something like "The Media Equation: How people treat computers like other people and places". This is an aspect of what has been called the CASA paradigm (Computers Are Social Actors) grtn! Erik