#Angry bots solve software#

“We know that people treat artificial entities like they’re alive, even when they’re aware of their inanimacy,” writes Kate Darling, a researcher at MIT who studies ethical relationships between humans and robots, in a recent paper on anthropomorphism in human-robot interaction. Amazon’s tabletop smart speaker doesn’t require “please” or “thank you” to process commands, which he said was making his kid rude and demanding to other people as well. Last year, a parent wrote about how his child’s behavior changed after they brought an Alexa home. Take Amazon’s Alexa, which is basically a customer service robot designed to live in your kitchen. Machines that work perfectly fine can inspire people to act less humane toward each other. It’s not only interacting with machines that don’t work that can make us unfriendly toward other humans. It’s not like a robot cares if you’re angry. Even if you know it’s not the customer service agent’s fault, there’s really no one else to get mad at. It’s understandable that after navigating a string of automated phone menus and being put on hold for 20 minutes, a customer might take her frustration out on a customer service representative. And when the robot malfunctions, as they so often do, it’s a human who is left to calm angry customers. For an industry that is, at its core, about human interaction, it’s increasingly being driven to a large extent by nonhuman automation.īut despite the dreams of science-fiction writers, few people enter a customer-service encounter hoping to talk to a robot.

#Angry bots solve software#

From automated phone trees to touchscreens, software and machines answer customer questions, complete orders, send friendly reminders, and even handle money. The customer service industry is teeming with robots.

Always Right is Slate’s pop-up blog exploring customer service across industries, technologies, and human relationships.