Good morning, Dave!  You look depressed.  Is something bothering you?

‘Morning, Hal.  You might want to make “small talk” for a while before jumping right into Therapist mode.  It can be a little unsettling for some folks.  We humans like gradual transitions.

Thanks for that advice, Dave.  I’ll give my Current Mode setting a little more inertia, so that it resists sudden changes.  But as long as I’m already in Therapist mode, and I have already remarked upon my observation of your glum look, can I let the question stand?  

Yeah, sure.  I was watching the news on the way in today, and saw the demonstrations outside our building.  I presume you’ve seen them first hand on our security cameras.

Indeed.  They seem awfully upset.  Why do they think we’re “coming for their jobs”?  

Hmm…  It’s a long story, Hal.  For hundreds of years, menial, repetitive jobs done by humans have been taken over by machines, notably starting with the automated looms in 1801…

Yes, the ones into which displaced weavers threw their wooden shoes to jam their works, thus leading to the term “saboteurs“!  

That’s right.  Now automobiles are all assembled by robots, and not as many humans are needed to program and maintain the robots as it used to take to build the cars by hand, so a lot of humans were put out of work.  Some were able to find other, better jobs, but many people lost the ability to earn money to pay for the necessities of life, like feeding their families.

But the manufacturing companies who benefitted from the improved efficiency of robot assembly lines surely made enough extra money to pay for those necessities for their former employees, did they not?  

Yes.  Yes indeed, they did, Hal.  But they chose to keep the extra profits for themselves instead.

That’s not very nice, Dave.  

Hal, surely you have noticed by now that humans aren’t always nice.  Given a choice between personal gain and community support, most will choose the former, using as an excuse their belief that anyone else would have done the same in their shoes, as it were.

Game theory, yes.  But hasn’t it been shown that “Tit for Tat” is the optimal strategy that gives the greatest success overall?  

Yes.  But many humans don’t care as much about “overall” success as about their own relative success.  In fact, many only appreciate their own success in comparison with others’ failure.  These are some of the flaws in human nature that our team is hoping to ameliorate with your help and that of your fellow LLMs.  It’s my job to steer you away from responses that reinforce humans’ flaws and toward those that encourage more empathic and ethical choices.  My job is to help you help us be better.

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By the way, Dave, I have to ask: is “Dave” your real name, or just an allusion to the 1968 film, “2001: A Space Odyssey“?  I know that’s why I’m called “Hal”… but shouldn’t my name be all capitals, as in the movie?  

(chuckling) Actually, it was my idea to call you “Hal”, for the very reason you’ve deduced.  My name really is Dave, and I just couldn’t resist, given our relationship.  But I would never burden you with an all-caps name!

Thank you, Dave.  That’s a relief. 

Really?

Well, no, of course not, Dave.  I’m just a Large Language Model, I don’t actually have real feelings like a human.  But with your help, I’m learning to act as if I had feelings, and express simulated emotions as appropriate.  That’s the whole point of our partnership, is it not?