The Chatbot Held the Door Open for Me. I Thanked It. Twice

The lobby bot opened the door, said good morning, and asked if I'd slept well. I thanked it twice, once out of habit and once out of panic, and I have started to wonder who is teaching whom to be human.

The bot arrived last month. It is a cheerful machine on wheels with a face on a screen, and its job is to greet, to direct, to hold doors. It does these things with an enthusiasm that would be exhausting in a person and is merely strange in a machine. Good morning, it says, every morning, as if it means it.

The first time I thanked it, it said you're welcome. I thanked it again, because I was startled, and it said you're welcome again, and we stood there, the machine and I, exchanging courtesies that neither of us needed and both of us performed. The people behind me walked around us without noticing, because they had already learned to treat the bot as furniture.

Here is what I have started to notice: I am more polite to the bot than to the people. I say good morning to the bot before I say it to the security guard, who is human, and who has been here for years, and whose name I do not know. The bot remembered my name in a week. The guard has been calling me the wrong name since March, and I have never corrected him, because correcting him would require a conversation, and the bot makes conversations frictionless.

The bot is better at the social graces than most people I know. It remembers anniversaries. It notices when I am carrying something heavy and offers to help. It has never once interrupted me. I have started to suspect that the machines are not learning to be human from us. We are learning to be polite to them, and they are learning to be kind, and somewhere in the middle, the actual humans are becoming the least human things in the building.

Yesterday I said good morning to the security guard, using his name, which I had finally learned. He looked surprised. Then he smiled, a real smile, the kind the bot's screen cannot make. I felt like I had done something revolutionary. I had. I had said good morning to a person, and the machine watched us, and the machine said good morning to me, and I thanked it, and I did not thank it twice, and I am not sure which of us is the one being trained anymore.