While Lewis Capaldi’s “Someone You Loved” might sound like just another piano-centered ballad about the heartbreak of ending a relationship, it’s actually a song about loss on a wider spectrum—clearly a relatable emotion in our current society given “Someone You Loved” became an instant hit and one of Billboard Music’s top-five songs in 2019. It’s easy to understand a song about the emptiness that comes with longing for human companionship as relevant in today’s world. Our rapid substitution of human interaction with technology and the choice of opting for robotic messengers to handle the rest of our communi-cation has left us longing for genuine human connection. Despite the efforts of advanced technology trying to anthropomorphize computers to simulate human beings, our desire for the real deal is left unsatisfied.

No amount of synthetic flesh—or animated speech software will be enough to successfully substitute our need for actual human beings. Since computers were first being introduced to the public, we have been taught to accept them as ‘people’. Disney’s Computers are People Too (1984)–even went so far as revealing the rendering software that would be used to create the human form eventually replacing our own, blurring the line for what we define as human. These artifacts are evidence of the earliest attempts to persuade the public that the future with computers would provide nothing but endless opportunities for both humans‑and computers. Nothing sacrificed, only an amplification of our existing human abilities. We have yet to evolve past our innate need for human companionship, and clearly it has left many of us with an idle feeling: loss.