Perhaps scarred by George Orwell’s creepy computers in the novel 1984, tech companies were eager to brand themselves as user friendly and non-threating (i.e., we won’t spy on you or steal your data). In Apple’s 1984 commercial computers were liberators, not oppressors. Software programs have had “friendly” human names like “Lisa”, “Siri”, (Apple), “Watson” (IBM), or even “Copilot” (Microsoft). AOL even added pre-recorded messages (“Welcome, You’ve Got Mail!”) to their software Jo in The Facts of Live TV show talked to a computer Read more on my #feministsciencsubstack feministscientist.substack.com/p/when-computers-talk-part-1 #toxicalgorithms #ai #feministscience #bigtech #siliconvalley #feministscience #sciencefeminism #feministsciencestudies