You’re ignoring a crucial aspect of your software — Emotion

There’s a bad habit that we, as an industry, need to shake. We need to stop treating machines like they’re people. Example? I was in a shop the other day and one of the self-service checkouts had a note covering the screen.

“Sorry, I’m poorly at the minute.”

If you’re not from the UK, ‘poorly’ in this context means unwell. I hate to break it to you but the machine isn’t unwell. It can’t tell you that it’s not feeling itself. It won’t ever apologise for it.

Machines don’t get ill; they malfunction. Machines don’t feel remorse that they are out of service; they just sit there unable to do anything. Machines don’t have a sense of self; they’re just waiting for an input so it can perform some calculations to give an output. Suggesting otherwise is an accident waiting to happen.

We do it because it makes machines look less intimidating. However, it’s as stupid as the “shrink it and pink it” phase we went through when we were trying to make things appeal to women by making them smaller and more girly. It’s an obvious strategy that has a low chance of working.