The Unbearable Indifference of Others
People hate the feeling that others don't care about them. Even if those 'others' are machines
This is a rare cross-post, appearing in both my newsletters. Robot-facing readers, I also write Who Cares? a newsletter about why people don't care about things it seems they ought to care about, like climate change or war or the hungry kids down the block. Readers of 'Who Cares?', I also write Robots for the Rest of Us, all about human-robot relations.
These newsletters are separate because I didn't see much overlap between the two topics. But there is at least one: People's feelings about being treated with indifference. These turn out to be the same even when the indifference is a machine's.
Most people are exquisitely sensitive to signs that others don't care about them. That's true in intimate relationships, where we want love ("don't you care how I feel?") but also in interactions with strangers, where we want politeness ("they didn't even apologize for the delay! They don't care about their customers!"). But I didn't expect it to be true of people's interactions with machines.…