This chapter examines a dramatic shift that underpins my research. While we continue to describe technology as a tool, we increasingly experience it as an entity with which we socially interact and form relationships. Large language models (LLMs), in particular, use language to make things feel like entities that perform social roles, such as empathy, comfort, advice, and authority, rather than merely functional tools. As a result, personification is no longer an exceptional reaction but has become almost automatic. I trace the origins of this shift by examining the long-standing inertia in design and usability discourse that prioritizes utility, alongside accumulated research on personification that shows how people project social norms and personal intentions onto technology even within this framework. I then explore how personification expands from function to role in robots and automated systems, and how language-capable AI amplifies this tendency to an unprecedented degree. Against this backdrop, the chapter argues for a shift in focus away from evaluating how well AI mimics humans and toward examining the expectations, emotions, and relationships of responsibility and dependence that people form through these technologies. This shift provides the conceptual starting point that runs through the design research case studies presented in the subsequent chapters.