We’ve invented a technology that hijacks that part of humanity more effectively than anything ever. Asking people to “not be so stupid” is not going to help.
And especially their design. The con artist politeness and confidence is not an accident of output, but a design choice by the developers.
I tell non-technical people: It's a software program; there is always a person behind it, and they have consciously chosen this output, to serve their own interests.
> Humans are wired to anthropomorphise; we do it with sticks and rocks.
I do not see people anthropomorphize their TVs, books, paintings, cars, houses, rocks, sticks, ... I'm not sure what you're talking about here. I haven't seen someone call a rock or stick by a pronoun, for example.
I've seen people fancifully do it, but it's exaggeration for a cute effect, and works because everyone knows they're exaggerating.
> We’ve invented a technology that hijacks that part of humanity more effectively than anything ever. Asking people to “not be so stupid” is not going to help.
People learn to look at things in different ways. Humans learn, society changes. It's changed quite a bit in recent years; it's much different than a century ago, a century before that, etc.
In a way, it's more worship of technology to say humans are hopelessly, powerlessly dumb, and technology inevitably rules them. The inevitability of technology is of course a self-serving trope of the industry: you are powerless, we are inevitable. How convenient, and short-sighted.
> In a way, it's more worship of technology to say humans are hopelessly, powerlessly dumb, and technology inevitably rules them.
You as an individual have some autonomy against the machines. Some. (Scroll facebook an hour a day and show me your resilience to engagement engineering). But the point of this is what happens at population scale.
To ignore our biology is as stupid as suggesting we must be ruled by it.