(I first published an earlier version of this essay three years ago in August 2020.)
One legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic will almost certainly be the increased use of robots in our society. Among their advantages, they don't need masks or social distancing and they don't take sick days, vacations or parental leave.
They also don't easily take offense when treated badly or need to be thanked for doing a good job. In fact they don’t require any emotional involvement whatsoever.
As robotized services including Alexa and Siri have become more embedded in our offices and households, a question that occurs to me is what long-term impact are they having on the way we communicate with those around us.
It starts, as do all things, with the children. Kids quickly learn to ask Siri or Aleza to do something in a commanding voice, which then becomes anger if the robot cannot comply with their wishes quickly enough.
I wonder how a child growing up in such circumstances will treat his or her employees in the future.
When voice commands first became a thing, I found myself speaking in a respectful voice and often thanking Siri for her help. Siri never answered. The engineers who developed her apparently hadn't bothered to work "you're welcome" into her vocabulary.
Thus, my politeness fell on deaf ears.
And although this type of software is supposed to be intelligent, i.e., it learns from interacting with us, in my experience our robotic friends are in no way learning to be more polite.
As for humans, when we are not rewarded for being polite, we tend to become less so over time. Gradually, for example, I’ve learned to issue simple straight-out commands to my voiced units. There is no point in engaging in social niceties with an entity that doesn’t respond accordingly, is there?
But what I am conditioning myself to become?
When it comes to the people who have designed the relevant software in this case, I‘m not sure that words like gracious, polite, or well-mannered are the first to pop into mind. I don't mean to be impolite, but many of these folks are direct, logical and on occasions outright rude. After all, social skills simply are not at a premium for anyone during an intense Agile development cycle.
As our society populates the environment with robots, maybe the ultimate effect will be that nobody will have much of a reason to be nice anymore.
This would, of course, resemble our political culture, where it seems politeness and respect for others became utterly extinct some time back.
Indeed, being not nice is often a virtue in modern America. And those who cheer on the misogynist, racist, homophobic demagogues at political rallies? They resemble nothing so much as robots.
The news summaries in an age like this might as well be compiled by robots as well, I guess, but in fact I’ve done the ones that follow in the old-fashioned way. So please enjoy them.
LINKS:
Trump Discovers That Some Things Are Actually Illegal (Atlantic)
The fall of Rudy Giuliani: How ‘America’s mayor’ tied his fate to Donald Trump and got indicted (AP)
Trump prosecutor Fani Willis faces racist abuse after indicting ex-US president (Guardian)
'You are in our sights': Black judge overseeing Trump 2020 indictment gets racist death threat (USA Today)
Trump’s Indictment Has Georgia Republicans Fearing Replay of 2020 (NYT)
Clues point to identities of ‘unindicted co-conspirators’ in alleged Ga. election office breach (WP)
The entire capital city of Canada’s Northwest Territories has been ordered to evacuate as hundreds of wildfires scorch the region, officials say (CNN)
Hurricane Hilary on path toward Southern California (CBS)
Hawaii’s governor promises to prevent ‘land grabs’ after Maui wildfires (Al Jazeera)
How a fight over immunity unraveled Hunter Biden’s plea deal (WP)
From Marc Benioff to Mark Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley’s billionaires have acquired huge plots of land in Hawaii. Here’s how they’re responding to the devastating fire (Fortune)
After Maui’s Wildfire Horror, Residents Search for a Way Forward (NYT)
Flying taxis could soon be a booming business (Economist)
What Happens to All the Stuff We Return (New Yorker)
Taliban official says women lose value if their faces are visible to men in public (AP)
Two years later, the US has abandoned both Afghanistan and accountability (The Hill)
How the lives — and sexual freedoms — of Genghis Khan’s Mongolians helped shape a civilisation (Financial Times)
Argentina’s angry polarization is a warning for the United States (WP)
Consulting giant McKinsey unveils its own generative AI tool for employees (Venture Beat)
AI Could Soon Help Us Talk to Animals, But There Is a Problem (ScienceAlert)
AP, other news organizations develop standards for use of artificial intelligence in newsrooms (AP)
The New York Times Has Had a Summer of AI Anxiety: “They’re Freaking Out” (Vanity Fair)
Giuliani Insists Breaking The Law Not A Crime (The Onion)
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