Make conversing with just about anything with a computer chip as common as twisting a dial, and we will be in a world that at first may feel like an old Disney cartoon in which the pots are gruff and the pianos are ticklish, but we can hope we are more amused than convinced by that anthropomorphism. Thinking that these things are actually our cheerful royal subjects, or worse, could reinforce our already planet-killing belief that we are the masters of our world and all we share it with. And, though I’m reluctant to say it, this is actually an argument for encouraging some degree of politeness when ordering our mindless tools around—not because they have feelings but because how we talk with an entity establishes and reinforces our place in relation to it.
On the positive side, conversational tools could help us get over the reductive narrowness many computer systems demand of us. “Set the temperature to 70° Fahrenheit” is speaking in the computer’s language of bits and specificity. “I’m cold” is the human language of what matters to us. If it goes beyond us barking orders at our lighting fixtures, we might regain a richer sense of the complexity of our world and experience.