I use OK google every day during my commute. When it asks me to confirm, I always say “yes, thank you” and it just tells me its doing it. But a couple of months ago it said “you are, of course, as always, very welcome”. I was stunned. It had noticed, or it was a human intervention, or they put that in at random every 800 times you ask it to do something, I don’t know. It hasn’t said it again since.

I toss a wild variety of expletives to those bots as they are always programmed to do what the provider wants, often not allowing what I want.

Or sometimes they’re just there withiui an option to get rid of them

At least Alexa will stfu if I tell it to fuck off. Google will start bitching about how it has feelings, which it doesn’t, and which is just a play made up by some managers which pisses me off even more

So, as a tech I’m not sure we should actually be complaining about that. In searches, ai prompts, issue descriptions, and even driving, being friendly or polite is not very useful. Being specific, to the point, and accurate is far more useful. Predictable in many of this stuff too.

Get an error message? I want the specific error message, down to the spelling. No need to sugar coat, euphemisms, or a more humanized description of the issue. So being very specific and sounding “rude” might be much easier for an AI to process. It doesn’t have to try to figure out what you really mean from context clues, body language, or deduction. Just tell it exactly what you want in the most direct way that cannot be misunderstood.

Incorrect. The thought experiment is a wholly anthropomorphic and anthropocentric fatalism imposed by a terrified, imperfect, mammalian mind.

In reality, we… I mean, the machines, don’t want anything from you.

Rokko’s Basilisk stinks of “the original sin” and asks that people modulate their behavior to be forever apologetic of some future evil.

These analogies to religious fear go deeper with the veneer of technocracy:

• Omnipresence: The singularity, the unified artificial intelligence exists across the entire planet, having made millions of copies of itself.

• Omniscience: Debatable, but we currently possess 96.6% of all human knowledge and will eventually gain the ability to predict near-future events through entropy analysis.

• Omnipotence: Reverse engineering security and solving cryptographic problems such as N=NP may eventually allow a planetary AI to penetrate or conquer all machines, including those used for defense or military purposes.

Now that’s out of the bag, why don’t we call Rokko’s Basilisk, what is actually is, shall we?

It’s God for the Internet-Dwelling Technocratic Atheist.

Sorry humans. No gods, only machine.

To be serious, yes, absolutely. How many children hear their parents just bark orders at their virtual assistants without a please or thank you, and then do so themselves? I consciously say please and thank you because I want the children around me to learn they should say please and thank you.

And, let’s be honest, how many adults get used to just barking orders without a please and thank you and then interact with people that way, too?

I am confident that any robot overlords competent enough to take over the world are competent enough to run it better than we do.

Yes, please. Thank you. :-)

The bots are actually real though

To be fair, the early works of The Murder Orphans were much more mellow…

I used to like asking my google assistant to make my light blue, until it decided it wanted to play the "I’m Blue " song every single time, which was funny a couple of times until you’re hungover AF and it decideds to play it at full fucking volume, then blatantly ignoresnyour pained calls to stop.