Talking to a robot in Star Trek or Star Wars is awesome. They can launch photon torpedoes for you or sass you about their mission to save the princess. Talking to a robot on your bank’s customer service line just sucks. “Yes!” “No!” “Agent! Agent! Agent!” And when the voice commands grow tiresome you end up tapping the “0” key furiously, only to be taken in ponderous circles while listening to an endless drone of menu options. Sure, the automatons sound polite and obliging, but one suspects their prime directive is to make sure the company’s human employees never ever hear the sound of your voice. They ask for piece after piece of information to make sure you’re routed to the correct representative, before routing you to the wrong representative—who’ll then send you back into telephonic purgatory because their department doesn’t handle those requests. By the time you reach a real human being who’s willing and able to assist you, you’ve become a shell of the person who dialed the phone: unpleasant, frustrated, demanding. So sayonara, robots. We’ll see you after the apocalypse. Even if we all end up enslaved by the machines, it won’t be as a bad as having to talk to them.