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Katie (Kathryn) Conrad's avatar

The first half of Sherry Turkle's Alone Together is illuminating in this regard--that is, suggesting how common this practice of ascribing a certain kind of agency, emotion, and human behavior to our own tech is. Nass & Moon's CASA (Computers as Social Actors) paradigm is, I think, a useful one.

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Andra Keay's avatar

Human tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects is well studied and has been well utilized by animators, entertainers and advertizers.

Reeves and Nass described how easily we are fooled in The Media Equation. More recently Ryan Calo at U Washington Law and cofounder of WeRobot conference has been was writing about the implications of digital nudging from robots or chatbots. And IEEE has done a lot of work on developing a standard for the ethical guidelines for digital nudging - P7008 https://sagroups.ieee.org/7008/

BUT talking about the ethics is no match for the profits involved in redirecting human attention/behavior.

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