Skip to main content

Apologies from nowhere

When out on the road in sunny Swindon I quite often pass busses carrying the inscription SORRY NOT IN SERVICE. I feel a strong urge to scream at said bus 'No you are not. You are not sorry at all. A bus can't be sorry, it's inanimate.'

I get the same irrational urge to talk to technology at the railway station. Over the tannoy we hear 'I'm sorry to announce that that the 3.17 to Upper Wombleton has been cancelled. I apologize to passengers for any inconvenience.' No you don't. You can't apologize, you are are a recording.

If I talked to a bus or a loudspeaker as if it were a person then I would rightfully be taken away for a little care and recuperation. So, equally, we ought to scrap any technology with pretensions of consciousness. Until someone really builds HAL 9000, and we have technology with a personality, it should stay that way.

Resist the urge, please, companies. Your equipment isn't sorry - don't make it tell me that it is.

Comments

  1. Sabine Hossenfelder7 December 2009 at 12:08

    Not sure what your point is. To me an "apology" is constituted of words, and can very well be uttered by a tape. The German expression for "I am sorry" is "Es tut mir leid," which means literally "It does pain to me." In this case I would agree it's not something a tape can reasonably claim.

    Anyway, I am presently in the Neatherlands, the bus passing by this morning splashing dirty water at me said simply "Geen Dienst." (No Service)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Brian Clegg7 December 2009 at 13:20

    I think my point is that to say 'I am sorry' you need to be an 'I' - which a bus or a recording isn't. Sorrow is an emotion, which can't be expressed by a machine. That's what I was trying to get at.

    ReplyDelete
  3. cromercrox7 December 2009 at 17:00

    I am always alarmed when I see notices that say 'This Door Is Alarmed'. Alarmed at what? Why? And what does it expect me to do about it?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...
118 comments
Read more

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...
25 comments
Read more