Be warned that it's not deep philosophy, just a bit of fun!
Edit: Reading it again now, I think the story stands up well, aside from its obvious 1970s-isms. If the story has any philosophical value today, it's that pretty soon we will actually build machines that behave like this (if it hasn't even been done already). And some of their owners will definitely treat them as sentient, even if obviously they are not. And at some point as the machines get better and better at this mimicry there'll be people demanding that laws are passed to protect them.
