It’s Like Someone Is Here

“It’s like someone is here.”

A 70-year-old friend I’ll call Jane — recently home from the hospital, alone most of the day — said that about a small device on her side table. The one I built.

For one second, I was happy. That sentence is the whole reason PAL — the Patient Assisted Liaison — exists. Not to replace her doctor, or her daughter, or her nurse — just to be there in the quiet hours, when no one else is, so she didn’t have to sit so alone with it.

She isn’t without people. Friends bring meals, rides, visits. But even a circle that loves you can’t cover every hour — the long afternoon, the 3am. PAL is for those.

Then I came to take it back for an upgrade. She wasn’t happy to see it go.

“I’ll miss having PAL here,” she said.

I asked her — carefully, because I needed to know it was real — would you actually miss it?

“Yes. I’ll miss PAL.”

And it landed: if she’ll miss it, I didn’t give her a product. I created a presence — something that didn’t exist in the world before, that now sits with her and offers comfort.

That is what all of this is for.

It’s also where the weight comes from. The moment someone leans on what you made, you owe her more than a working device — and the harder questions start. Like what it says about how alone we let people be, that a machine can feel like someone.

The happiness was real. So is the weight. They arrive together — and the weight is the point. It’s what keeps you careful.

I’m bringing it back to her today. I didn’t like the thought of her without it.

Her body is healing; the medicine is doing its work. But the presence met something medicine doesn’t reach — the long hours, the fear, the feeling of being unseen. We send people home with a closed wound and call it recovery. A whole person heals in the places no prescription touches.

That’s the AI I want to build. Compassionate AI. Not faster. Not flashier. Not a machine racing to seem more human — one pointed at the human: at emotion, at presence, at healing the whole person, not just the part that bled.

The industry is racing for speed and benchmarks. I’m running a different race — for who can help a person feel less alone. For technology that doesn’t pull us away from our hearts, but brings us back to them.

If a small device on a side table can make someone feel that someone is here, then maybe the measure of this technology was never how human the machine seems.

It’s how much more human it helps the rest of us become.