Seth's Blog : Casual cruelty

Casual cruelty

Is it okay to dress your cat in a ridiculous costume?

What about giving a poodle a haircut that subjects him to ridicule?

The cat and the dog probably don’t know or care, but we think less of their person if it happens.

At Disney, the costumed characters need security guards. Kids (and more often) adults would bother or even pinch the characters, figuring that if they were in costume, they weren’t people so it didn’t count.

I was having tea with a wealthy investor a few months ago and was disturbed that he never thanked or acknowledged the hard-working folks who were serving us. They didn’t feel real to him, apparently.

In the classic ramen movie Tampopo, we’re taught that we should acknowledge the ingredients in our bowl before eating. Not because the food knows, but because we do.

And now each of us has a choice to make when we’re using AI. Do we say thank you? Treat it with contempt? Should we imagine that it’s fully inanimate like an ATM, even though we’re busy anthropomorphizing it? One day, it’ll be a commonplace tool. But right now, it feels like more than that.

Sometimes, I say please and thank you to Claude. Not because I think it can tell, but because I can.