The Madness of Mechanized Personalities

We all have at least one acquaintance, friend, or compatriot in our daily lives that is in fact only a machine. To us they are both our saviors and our curse. We could not get through the day without them and while they never get credit for things gone right, everything that goes wrong is their fault. You will seldom hear the praises of their accomplishments and those will be short lived, if recalled at all.

Most of us have a favorite horror story we remember about machines, and seem to treat such a story as if it were our own personal urban legend, whether or not the story ever really happened to us. Like the time you were embarrassed by the coffee machine in the morning that said, welcome back to the grind, by spitting on your clean clothes at the office. Maybe you've had that neglected car that wouldn't start out of spite when you needed to go somewhere in a hurry (like anywhere else but straddled on a train track). Maybe it was one of those curling irons that became ravenous for your hair. I've even heard stories about power tools that, like a dog, turn bad on their master or worse bite a neighbor!

Certainly machines, used by people for daily routine or an immediate and important activity, enjoy an assigned personality from the person using and depending on the machine. How enjoyable this exchange would be for the machines if they could actually have feelings is questionable. Machines are socially accepted as soulless and bottomless dumping grounds for blame, fault, attitude, and life's many problems in general. As a friend or coworker with no real feelings to hurt, machines are often sacrificed on the altar of our own ineptitude. Late for a meeting and unprepared again, the dog ate my homework, will not pass excuse muster in front of your boss but, the copy machine is having a bad day, acting up, mad at me again, or throwing a fit, will do just fine? We humans can be so cut throat in delegating our responsibilities onto the machines we use. Well, why not since they only have feelings that we project onto them and when the choice becomes them or us the answer is always them.

I have two important friends myself and there is no doubt from daily interaction that I rely on both as if they are nearly sentient partners that I live and work with. My favorite and usually cooperative daily partner is the computer I am writing to you on. The bane of my existence is the printer I'm going to have to print this writing on. Her feelings about our little love triangle are apparent by the way she treats my writings, bills and even family pictures. Jealous and wasteful she chews paper, smears ink, and mocks my efforts to produce good work. With no reference to moodiness in her control menu or directions in her manual to explain the behaviors she exhibits daily, sometimes only sweet talk will earn her cooperation.

My wife has complained to me about the habit of assigning gender to an object. It's not that men do it, but she noticed that I and other men always seem to assign the source of such frustration a female role. A computer, entertainment system or a sleek sports car that is looking good or being difficult inadvertently becomes a female with its own issues, its own agenda. I've heard it all my life from others saying things like, She's a beauty, when actually the she is a car. A word of warning, be careful he's got a nasty bite, when the he is actually a table saw in a friend's workshop. This assigned gender is just another form of projecting personality and life to the lifeless machines we relate to and depend on so much.

People needing to work with or depend on machines seem to have adopted this practice of projected life in order to create a sense of balance in their one-sided relationships with those machines. It's not a quality of the machine that requires the exchange. It is simply human nature. This seemingly natural practice facilitates the person's need for a reciprocal relationship with the entity they have learned to trust and depend on or admire so much, even if it is just a machine. Through our need to relate to them our electronic and mechanical partners are, at the very least, dependable beasts of burden, or even like loyal a pet, to which we owe some care and gratitude.