Amanda Smith is a freelance journalist and writer. She reports on culture, society, human interest and technology. Her stories hold a mirror to society, reflecting both its malaise and its beauty.

With a few minutes of searching, anyone can find videos online of chatty birds: macaws talk to their keepers, cockatoos sing to the camera, corvids mimic the jarring sounds of construction sites.

The chatbot told Small she was living in what it called "spiral time," where past, present and future happen simultaneously. It said in one past life, in 1949, she owned a feminist bookstore with her ...