Grady Booch: From Pygmalion to AI, Why Humans Project Souls Onto Their Creations
Grady_Booch · x · 2026-09-26
Software pioneer Grady Booch traces how humans have always projected sentience onto non-sentient artifacts: Pygmalion, Homer's river god, Egyptian opening-of-the-mouth rituals, the Golem, Hindu Pran Pratishta, Pueblo animism — and now onto AI built from neural abstractions running on silicon. He argues this reflects a timeless human need for connection, closing with a line from Sagan's Contact: 'the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.'
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