"There are corporations out there that are trying to envisage us forming emotional affective engaged relationships with robotic dogs," Colin Allen says.
Of course: This is all still in infant stage. The current creep is not hardware. It's especially software bots.
"We are in an environment already where everytime you go and run a credit card for a purchase some machine decides whether or not to approve that."
There is no direct human oversight of that.
"If you don't like the decision you can get on the phone and hope to talk to a person. But this person is also looking at a computer screen and been guided what they see on that screen."
Colin Allen is spot on. At least that's my experience. Once there were autocrats. Now we have autocrat IT systems.