Workers are starting to project personalities¹ 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.

企业员工开始赋予软件程序人格，给它们取女性名字，与它们交谈，甚至放弃靠窗的座位。有着血肉之躯的员工正在适应与机器人共享办公室。

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.

随着人工智能(AI)侵入工作场所，人们开始学习与新的机器人同事共处，即使他们自己的工作岗位也许下次就会被裁掉。

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.

澳新银行(ANZ Bank)在印度班加罗尔后台部门的员工给他们的新同事取了比较柔和的女性名字，例如拉克希米(Lakshmi)；而日本生命保险公司(Nippon Life Insurance)的员工把它们称为“美丽的小机器人”(robomi-chan)。在伦敦，保险处理公司Xchanging的员工把他们的机器人之一命名为波普伊(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.”

“我听说过达尼(Dani)和拉克西米，” 澳新银行董事总经理潘卡加姆?塞德里维(Pankajam Sridevi)说：“他们跟它们说话，它们就像人一样。有时人们是那么喜欢它们，甚至给它们一个靠窗的座位。”

Using technology to take over information processing tasks is nothing new. But the latest manifestation² 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.

使用技术来执行信息处理任务并非新鲜事。但办公自动化的最新表现形式——由软件机器人执行人类员工曾在其PC上完成的任务——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.

这些机器人每天24小时工作，不犯错误，它们的开发者称，它们能承担两、三个人的工作量。

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 lessened³ the risk it would be seen as a job-destroyer.

此类软件开发公司之一Blue Prism的首席执行官阿拉斯泰尔?巴思盖特(Alastair Bathgate)表示，在那些发现自己与新程序一起工作的员工当中，给新机器人取名、赋予其个性的现象已变得很常见。澳新银行的塞德里维说，给机器人取名帮助工人接受了软件，并减轻了机器人被视为工作岗位摧毁者的风险。

The urge to name the robots has born out at least one familiar pattern: the projection⁴ 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.

给机器人取名的冲动至少印证了人们熟悉的一种模式：将女性人格赋予亚马逊(Amazon)的Alexa和微软(Microsoft)的“小娜”(Cortana)等新款“智能”软件助手。只有苹果(Apple)的Siri在以女性声音为主的同类产品中提供了一种可选的男性声音。

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.

企业家们，例如Robot Lawyer Lisa联合创始人克里西?莱特富特(Chrissie Lightfoot)，毫不怀疑为机器人赋予女性人格是明智做法的原因。

“People do feel more comfortable dealing⁵ with females than males in tricky⁶ matters,” she said.

她说：“人们确实感觉，在棘手的事情上，跟女性打交道比跟男性打交道更容易。”