Can a chatbot have feelings?

Computers have been pretending to have feelings since the first Macintosh computer screen showed a smiley face on startup back in 1984. Or maybe earlier, if you count Star Wars' R2-D2 and C-3PO (though it took human actors inside to make those feelings come out). Almost as long as people have interacted with machines, they've wanted to have some reassurance that the machines were listening to them. Software designers (and special effects designers, too) used sleight of hand to give the impression of feelings to very early computers. Those "feelings" were exchanged only one way: No one really thought that the early Mac was happy, and it certainly didn't know if the user was smiling back. Let's face it, with early computers, it didn't matter.