Why We Might Want Robots to Be Jerks

The other day, I called it an idiot and it replied, "I won't respond to that." I added--for research purposes only!--an ethnic slur about Irishmen, to suit the Irish male voice I've given it. All it lilted back was, "Is there something else I can help you with?" Human servants, despite their lack of power, often found ways of making clear they weren't so patient. We know this from centuries of complaints by their employers. Virginia Woolf's diary, for instance, is filled with gripes about the people who tended her. She and her cook, Nellie Boxhall, fought, resented, fretted over, and cried about each other for nearly 20 years.