It's thinking about it...
From Telkoth.net
This has been going on all my life, but I really started to notice at Barnes & Noble: anthropomorphizing the computer. Not so long ago, Barnes & Noble decided that they needed a new, shinier version of "Book Master", the program that the employees use to look stuff up, and which the customers are not supposed to use since it can also be made to order books.
While Book Master 8.0 certainly has some improvements, it is also noticably slower, and I find myself much more frequently than last year saying things like "it's thinking about it..." to the customers while the computer plods along, trying its best to comply with my requests. Most of them understand, and a few of those chuckle at the anthropomorphization (why can't that word be shorter?). One woman even made a short comment about it. I didn't really think it was that strange. I mean, the computer is clearly no living being, but how else should I explain it? "Hold on while the computer processes my query"? I should try that one day.
Well, just now I was poking around about how to get books published, then got on the subject of publishing itself, which lead to LaTeX, which lead to lEd (ow?), where I followed one link or another before finally ending up to a page I'd been to before: The Jargon File.
The Jargon File is neat, but also... maybe too stereotypical? Or more that it's too broad... well, so are stereotypes... Anyway, I found this page nestled within about anthropomorphization, and I was surprised at how accurately it describes me. Here, here: check out some of this:
Almost all hackers subscribe to the mechanistic, materialistic ontology of science [...]. In this view, people are biological machines — consciousness is an interesting and valuable epiphenomenon, but mind is implemented in machinery which is not fundamentally different in information-processing capacity from computers.
Hackers tend to take this a step further and argue that the difference between a substrate of CHON atoms and water and a substrate of silicon and metal is a relatively unimportant one; what matters, what makes a thing ‘alive’, is information and richness of pattern. This is animism from the flip side; it implies that humans and computers and dolphins and rocks are all machines exhibiting a continuum of modes of ‘consciousness’ according to their information-processing capacity.
Because hackers accept that a human machine can have intentions, it is therefore easy for them to ascribe consciousness and intention to other complex patterned systems such as computers. If consciousness is mechanical, it is neither more or less absurd to say that “The program wants to go into an infinite loop” than it is to say that “I want to go eat some chocolate” — and even defensible to say that “The stone, once dropped, wants to move towards the center of the earth”.
I also just now noticed that I said "here, here", which disappointed me because the page on Verb Doubling had seemed particularly silly to me. Upon thinking about it, I am also likely to say "good, good" or "fine, fine" when people ask how I am. I guess that's all "Noun Doubling," though, so perhaps another page needs to be added to The Jargon File.
