Communicating

Round our way buses talk. ‘Sorry I’m full’. ‘Sorry, I’m not in service’. ‘Catch me to the station.’ I hate it. I’m quite content with Thomas the Tank Engine talking to small children but since when did we adults need buses talking to us?
 
There’s an odd thing going on. Increasingly we’re using language as if inanimate objects were animate. Printed on a box of tea bags in our kitchen is, ‘My bags are unbleached’. I’m not sure whether it’s the tea or the box ‘talking’ to me but whichever it is I’d much rather it didn’t.
 
We’re also doing the opposite: making humans inanimate. The first example I remember was in the 80s when I stopped being part of my employer’s ‘personnel’ and instead became a (human) resource. More recently I’ve been struck by how often I read things like ‘the people that went’ rather than ’the people who went’. (In fact ‘that’ for people has a long heritage – Chaucer, King James Bible – but over the last few years I’ve heard and read it more and more often.)
 
What’s happening? Are people becoming less important as machines become more (artificially) intelligent and more significant in our lives? I haven’t yet seen AlphaGo, the computer program that beat the European Go champion in January, referred to as ‘who’ but maybe that’s on its way.
 


I’ve been musing on this for a week or so and went out today to take pictures to illustrate what I was thinking about. On my way back I changed my mind and decided to blip something else. But when I got home and saw the added human communication (in my second but not my first picture of this) I was heartened. It’ll be a while before a bus tells me to fuck off for taking its picture.


Edit: I've just remembered when I phoned to tell the police I was locked in a park and they thought 'I' meant 'my car' and told me to come back and fetch it in the morning.