Better Them Than Me

I will freely admit that I have never been above talking to inanimate objects. Every time my car takes a second to turn over or my computer won't open a program in a timely manner I will start out with a few words of encouragement and if that doesn't work (and it never does), I switch over to trying to motivate through fear. But even beyond those I have been known to compliment various appliances if they complete a task better than I expected them to. I find there is nothing wrong with doing this just on the off chance machines can actually hear us. The last thing you want to do is anger the machines and cause them not to work because then you will have to do their job instead. I'm not above washing dishes or doing the spell-checking on my own, but it is just nice to have the back-up. In fact, as more people start to cede responsibilities to computers in the future I expect the idea of talking to them to become standard practice. Most people are halfway there already by assigning personalities to machines saying things like, "That copier is really temperamental." It is crazy if you look at it from an outside view but less so if you have ever been trying to get one last task done before your weekend can start and the machine won't cooperate because at that point you'll try whatever you can think of to change its mind.

It is because I know how often people do this in office settings that I was not surprised to read an article this week which concluded that soldier in war zones are getting so attached to their bomb-dismantling machines that they don't want to risk them and it is starting to impact their effectiveness. Basically, the soldiers think it is too dangerous for these machines to be doing the one task they were designed to do. Thankfully I have never been in a war zone but I can totally understand where they are coming from. First off, they are probably told every day how expensive these robots are. I don't care who you are or what you are doing, knowing how much something cost is going to make you tentative whenever you are asked to send that robot out to examine a suspicious package. But the bigger issue is also that if these robots can't go out and hunt for bombs than these soldiers are going to have to do it instead. We are constantly hearing about how long it takes to requisition items in the military, so I would imagine a new bomb-hunting robot would take a few months. If you told me that until the replacement showed up I would have to do that job I would handle that robot with kid gloves as well. I certainly wouldn't try and fix it by giving it the old "Fonzie" treatment, which is how I try and fix broken items now.