Unwelcome Mat

Computers can be useful tools or servants, but they are not human; they have no feelings and no dignity, and humans have no more obligation to treat them as equals than we have toward any other machine. If you don’t think humans need to get the consent of a power saw or dishwasher before using it, you also shouldn’t think computer programs are owed good manners. Yet since the 1980s, humans have been presented with an ever-increasing number of circumstances in which we are confronted by machines whose owners and operators apparently expect others to treat them as though they were sentient beings. It was already bad enough when the machines were merely recordings of human voices intended to guide customers through an ersatz replacement for a phone operator by advising us to press this number to speak to that human; by the ’90s they started expecting us to talk back to them, then in this century humans began to be replaced by machines at every step of the process, so a computer operator…