<p>FORTUNE -- When the robot wrote to me it used a pen. The robot's letter came in the mail, the usual way a letter does, and on the envelope, in fine cursive, the robot had written my address, its return address, and sealed the envelope using wax the color of gold. The robot's words were not its own. The letter read:</p><p>"I am touching a glass screen to construct and then send this message, deconstructed as frequency then pulses of light to arrive at a machine, which will mimic human handwriting to reconstruct this message on paper. Then it will be posted to me. I think.."</p><p>And that was it. The robot had run out of its allotted 255 characters. Or, more precisely, I had run out of the allotted 255 characters days earlier, when I opened an application on my iPhone called Bond and typed the message to myself. I still wasn't sure what I thought.</p><p>Bond is a gift-giving, letter-writing service that has been described as "like Uber" for hand-picked presents and personal messages. The letters cost $5, the gifts range from "under $50" to "under $250" categories. But how personal can a message be if you're not the one writing it? How special is that present if it's quickly selected on your phone from a few dozen items pre-picked by Bond? And if the importance of a gift is the thought behind it, wasn't the very nature of Bond's approach -- to speed and ease the act of giving -- less thoughtful? Wasn't it just a cynical distillation of basest, most consumerist aspects of gifting?</p><p><a href="http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/12/06/bond-startup-robot/">Keep reading...</a></p>