Being more connected than ever is, it seems, concomitant with being lonelier than ever. It is easy to imagine a future in which a real human presence has all the wonder of the appearance of an angel.

When I was very young, I was frightened and upset by the noise of a vacuum cleaner. My mother put her arm around it and said, “Nice Mr Vacuum Cleaner!” It worked! What was random became personal. I was able to relate to it. The person of my mother mediated sense. The personal touch was all-important in my learning. I learned from her personally that what surrounded me at that moment was not threatening. The fiction that the machine was a person enabled me to see the truth that I need not be afraid.

Nowadays we are surrounded by less maternal claims of personhood: bots impersonate some kind of loving presence that would solve our problems on the “help” pages on websites. Of course, the people who run businesses realise that we are happier talking to real ­people and so there are telephone numbers we can ring. But the people who answer the phone are looking at computer screens, as is evident from the way they say things like “I’ve nothing coming up” or “the system won’t let me do that”. The person is subordinate to the machine. Even if a real person is generating content on the internet, the machine delivers it in a way that generates the illusion that the receiver is the personally intended recipient: the interpersonal becomes the parasocial, storing up disappointment should there be an actual meeting.

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