I'm sorry for any inconvenience

That's what the lady said over the station loudspeaker. Or perhaps I would better say 'voice' rather than lady. It seems odd because it was clearly a computer piecing together an announcement from segments of recorded speech for the occasion. The seg for the train time, the seg for the destination, the seg for the train operator and the seg with words of apology.

Except, is it really an apology? Quite clearly the person who originally actually enunciated the words was, at that time, presumably, following a scripture and had no real fault to view, merely possible future faults of train operators or infrastructure management. So the 'I' seems problematic. It isn't the person ostensibly saying the words: they are separated in time and space and technology from the occasion: they have no real ongoing connection with it; it is only the acoustic pattern originally taken from their performance in a recording studio and linked to an algorithm for generating composites of announcement material from segments.

Of course, the voice actor probably understood that they were lending their voice to allow the 'station' to speak. But that still leaves us wondering who is the 'I'? The company? Who is offering regret or even accepting responsibility?

What is intriguing me is the possibility that it is indeed the company. The corporation may be becoming an 'I' out of 'we' or even from 'it' or 'they'.

So, can I forgive 'it'? What would that mean?

Well, the person who commissioned the system clearly intended that the announcements should function in customer relations to mediate the station/company's service to passengers and they were doing so as representatives of the company/ies. Perhaps this bears some relationship to the neuronal and muscular systems that our bodies use to convey our intentions through our communicative strategies?

So I guess I could forgive 'them'; but the 'I' is not a human person if I do so but rather a 'corporisation'. 'Forgive' would mean forbearance, refusal to propagate further the wrong; just as with another human being ...