What’s a bigger turnoff, a scam from a bot or a human with the usual misspelling?
I’d have to say the human by far yields a bigger reaction from me though the bot would/should be infinitely more worrisome. The bot will only get better at what it does and while the romantic view shows a beautiful bot that actually wants to please us, the likely and very shameful reality is that the technology would be employed to nefarious ends.
Still, a bot generates much less a response from me when it’s just text to read…UNLESS there’s movement attached to it that’s designed to annoy, for example a pop-up window on a web page in front of the obviously intended content a user chose to read.
I look upon physical robots as fun and endearing but then I don’t have any contact with them. I hear there’s one at Giant supermarkets but I haven’t gone to one to see it. Imagine if one of them were to be in, say, a book store where I was trying to read the sides of books and the robot tried to get my attention to suggestive sell or stick some other book in front of my eyes like a pop-up window on a web page. LOL, I’m already getting riled up thinking about it.
Imagine Twiggy robot from Buck Rogers coming up behind you at Barnes & Noble talking in that infernal auto-attendent voice from your least favorite customer service phone call. The m/f and f-bombs would become much more commonplace and I don’t think our society would be improved. Even if Twiggy started with “Beedeebeedee” I would curse it out and probably want to get physical with it. I see someone losing it and hurting themselves in public hitting a robot. What is next? Taking a crowbar with you into book stores so you can fend off the goddam robots. Or bring your own robot, I guess. OR worse, pay some malware type of company that makes robots to keep you safe.
Now how many of us would choose the robot that looks like our favorite attractions?
I will end this with my choice of robots. I choose the posse of vampires in Fright Night 2 (1988) in the picture from IMDB below. Led by Regine Dandridge (Julie Carmen) in the foreground and right, the guy second from the left was often on rollerskates when he hunted. His robot would also be on skates. All these robots would only transform into vampire mode if angered by annoying robots or over enthusiastic sales persons. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097390/?ref_=ttmi_tt
Matt "Quiddity" McGovern's Blog 