Artificial intelligence (AI) is the ultimate kind of automation. The aspiration is to create a kind of intelligence that can take over as many of our tasks as possible . As we increasingly rely on AI in more spheres of life —from health and policing, finance to education, and everything in between— it’s worth asking ourselves whether increased automation will lead to a loss of expertise, and to what extent that might be a problem. We better use the skills that we don't want to lose.

Limits need to be set on AI’s ability to simulate human feelings. Ensuring that chatbots don’t use emotive language, including emojis, would be a good start. Emojis are particularly manipulative. Humans instinctively respond to shapes that look like faces — even cartoonish or schematic ones — and emojis can induce these reactions. Chatbots using emojis hijack our instinctive empathic responses. We can be deceived into feeling empathy for an inanimate object that pretends to be sentient by design. In the long run, ethics is good for business. Tech companies stand a better chance of making ethical products — and thriving — if they avoid deception and manipulation.

In this paper, I argue against views that equate privacy with control over self-presentation and explore some of the implications of my criticism for the online world. I argue that to combat some of the negative trends we are witnessing online we need, on the one hand, to cultivate a culture of privacy, in contrast to a culture of exposure. On the other hand, we need to readjust how we understand self-presentation online. I argue that in some cases we should understand it in similar terms to how we understand advertisement or fiction. By changing our conventions online, we would be taking away some of people’s control over self-presentation by not taking their online personae at face value.