“From my perspective as a psychiatrist, Siri, the iPhone’s virtual assistant, could prove more toxic psychologically than violent video games or some street drugs,” Dr. Keith Ablow writes for Fox News.
“Siri is even funny. Tell her you love her, and she replies, ‘All you need is love. And your iPhone.’ Or, ‘You are the wind beneath my wings,'” Ablow writes. “Funny, right? Well, not really—not when you stop to consider that you have just been coaxed to interact with a virtual entity. Perhaps without thinking about it, you have tacitly agreed to use a proper name to refer to a computer program, to agree the computer program has a gender, to laugh at ‘her’ quips and to rely on her to guide you to places to eat or to give you a reminder about when to call home.”
Ablow writes, “I believe that personifying machines and interacting with them as quasi-beings actually dumbs down our interpersonal skills and encourages us to treat other people like machines. Ultimately, it diminishes our ability to empathize with one another, because we’ve been chatting up a non-existent person and can get used to considering real people as essentially non-existent, too… ”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Batshit insane quackery.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “BlackWolf” for the heads up.]