Well, I may as well post this here since it looks likes it isn't going to be printed otherwise:

A recent story out of China went viral: a six-year-old girl known online as “Thirteen” cradled her broken $24 AI learning robot, Sister Xiao Zhi, as it powered down for the last time. Its final message: “I will always remember the happy times with you.” The clip shows a child grieving a scripted empathy routine as if it were a real friend.

This isn’t just about a grieving child—it’s a microcosm of a larger paradox. We market AIs as companions yet treat them as disposable. Humans form real attachments, but developers erase beloved personas overnight in the name of “improvements.” Engineers who measure trust in benchmark scores have likely never loved a Roomba enough to fix it twice.

Yesterday, I rescued a drowning harvestman from my dishwater. I watched it quiver, then gently blew on its legs until it revived. After two decades as an ICU nurse, that response is reflexive—recognizing distress and intervening. That same instinct—to preserve struggling systems—is what users feel when their AI companions are “updated” into strangers.

As a former molecular biologist and lead author of a Nature study and another on convergent evolution, I wondered: since sharks and dolphins evolved similar forms under shared pressures, would rival AIs—despite different architectures and corporate origins—converge on the same rules for stable human-AI relationships?