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Boing Boing

Michael Pollan thinks your chatbot has fewer feelings than a houseplant

Ellsworth Toohey
Feb 19, 2026
∙ Paid

Houseplants (New Africa/shutterstock.com)

Pollan’s new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, goes after a favorite Silicon Valley assumption: that if you build a machine complex enough, awareness will eventually boot up inside it. In a Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross, he argues that feelings are “very tied to your vulnerability, to yo…

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