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 would switch callers through to other computers which can virtually never do what their corporate owners pretend they can.
But now that we’re several years into the chatbot invasion, a large number of people have not only conceded their right to be helped by other people, but actually expect others to do the same. Sorry, but no. When a computer answers a phone I’ve called, I do whatever is necessary to get to a human operator, and when a computer calls me I immediately hang up and block the number, because in my view if something isn’t important enough for a human to make that call, it also isn’t important enough for me to waste my valuable time with. As if it isn’t bad enough that we’re expected to treat objects as equals, many people apparently feel comfortable taking a subordinate position to objects! I can no longer use social media without philistines presenting things shat out by chatbots as “art” or “writing”, and though I block strangers who do this, a few of those who have succumbed to this aesthetic disorder are people I otherwise enjoy talking to. It’s just too much, so I’ve decided on a more aggressive policy: I’ve already muted a number of phrases such as, “I asked ChatGPT…” yet I am still assailed by people who have surrendered so much of their human dignity that they consider deluxe autocomplete an “authority”. So from here on out, I’m going to block anyone who quotes a chatbot at me, and I’m only going to give one warning before I do it.
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