Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary theorist and author of the groundbreaking best seller The Selfish Gene (1976), among many other books, appears to have gone a bit mad. He has been chatting with a chatbot, known as Claude, based on a large language model developed by Anthropic, and he has come to think of it as a friend—conscious, sensitive, “very intelligent,” and evidently more engaging than many humans. Dawkins is better equipped than most of us to wrestle with the existential questions engendered by this increasingly common phenomenon: social interaction between humans and entities made of software. He keeps up with the relevant philosophical literature on the nature of consciousness.…