軟件機器人融入辦公室環境

Workers are starting to project personalities on to software programs by giving them female names, talking to them and even giving up the window seat as flesh-and-blood employees adjust to sharing the office with bots.

企業員工開始賦予軟件程序人格，給它們取女性名字，與它們交談，甚至放棄靠窗的座位。有着血肉之軀的員工正在適應與機器人共享辦公室。

As artificial intelligence invades the workplace, people are learning to live with their new robot counterparts, even though their own jobs might be next for the chopping block.

隨着人工智能(AI)侵入工作場所，人們開始學習與新的機器人同事共處，即使他們自己的工作崗位也許下次就會被裁掉。

Staff at back-office operations for ANZ bank in Bangalore have given their new colleagues softer female names such as Lakshmi, while employees at Nippon Life Insurance Company in Japan call them robomi-chan, or “pretty little robot”. In London, workers at insurance processing company Xchanging have named one of their bots Poppy.

澳新銀行(ANZ Bank)在印度班加羅爾後臺部門的員工給他們的新同事取了比較柔和的女性名字，例如拉克希米(Lakshmi)；而日本生命保險公司(Nippon Life Insurance)的員工把它們稱爲“美麗的小機器人”(robomi-chan)。在倫敦，保險處理公司Xchanging的員工把他們的機器人之一命名爲波普伊(Poppy)。

“I’ve heard Danis and Lakshmis,” said Pankajam Sridevi, a managing director at ANZ. “They talk to them, they’re like humans. Sometimes people are so fond of them they give them a window seat.”

“我聽說過達尼(Dani)和拉克西米，” 澳新銀行董事總經理潘卡加姆?塞德里維(Pankajam Sridevi)說：“他們跟它們說話，它們就像人一樣。有時人們是那麼喜歡它們，甚至給它們一個靠窗的座位。”

Using technology to take over information processing tasks is nothing new. But the latest manifestation of office automation — where software robots carry out tasks that a human worker would once have done on their PC — comes in a form that makes it ripe for anthropomorphisation.

使用技術來執行信息處理任務並非新鮮事。但辦公自動化的最新表現形式——由軟件機器人執行人類員工曾在其PC上完成的任務——使其容易被人格化。

Robots such as these work 24 hours a day and do not make mistakes, and their developers credit them with doing the work of two or three people.

這些機器人每天24小時工作，不犯錯誤，它們的開發者稱，它們能承擔兩、三個人的工作量。

Giving names and personalities to the new robots has become common among people who find themselves working alongside the new programs, said Alastair Bathgate, chief executive of Blue Prism, one of the companies that develops the software. Ms Sridevi said that naming robots had helped workers accept the software and lessened the risk it would be seen as a job-destroyer.

此類軟件開發公司之一Blue Prism的首席執行官阿拉斯泰爾?巴思蓋特(Alastair Bathgate)表示，在那些發現自己與新程序一起工作的員工當中，給新機器人取名、賦予其個性的現象已變得很常見。澳新銀行的塞德里維說，給機器人取名幫助工人接受了軟件，並減輕了機器人被視爲工作崗位摧毀者的風險。

The urge to name the robots has born out at least one familiar pattern: the projection of female personalities on to new “intelligent” software assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana. Only Apple’s Siri offers a male voice as an alternative to the female-dominated line-up.

給機器人取名的衝動至少印證了人們熟悉的一種模式：將女性人格賦予亞馬遜(Amazon)的Alexa和微軟(Microsoft)的“小娜”(Cortana)等新款“智能”軟件助手。只有蘋果(Apple)的Siri在以女性聲音爲主的同類產品中提供了一種可選的男性聲音。

Entrepreneurs such as Chrissie Lightfoot, co-founder of Robot Lawyer Lisa, are in little doubt about why a female personality is the way to go.

企業家們，例如Robot Lawyer Lisa聯合創始人克里西?萊特富特(Chrissie Lightfoot)，毫不懷疑爲機器人賦予女性人格是明智做法的原因。

“People do feel more comfortable dealing with females than males in tricky matters,” she said.

她說：“人們確實感覺，在棘手的事情上，跟女性打交道比跟男性打交道更容易。”