A lesser-known outcome of the study is that it was seized on by critics of psychoanalysis as evidence that most (human) therapists are similarly offering unthinking, mechanical responses that are mistaken for something meaningful — a complaint that lives on in the term psychobabble, coined to describe a set of repetitive verbal formalities and standardized observations that don’t require any actual thought. The charge is in many ways typical of the drift of technological criticism: any attempt to demonstrate the meaninglessness of machine intelligence inevitably ricochets into affirming the mechanical nature of human discourse and human thought.