Are Manners Obsolete?
(I first published a version of this essay six years ago and it feels quaint. Lots has changed since then, with the coming of AI, and being polite is hardly our main concern.)
One legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic is the increased use of robots in our society. Among their advantages, they don’t need masks or social distancing and they don’t take sick days, vacations or parental leave.
They also don’t easily take offense when treated badly or need to be thanked for doing a good job. In fact they don’t require any emotional involvement whatsoever.
As robotized services including Alexa and Siri have become more embedded in our offices and households, a question that occurs to me is what long-term impact are they having on the way we communicate with each other.
It starts, as do all things, with the children. Kids quickly learn to ask Siri or Alexa to do something in a commanding voice, which then becomes anger if the robot cannot comply with their wishes quickly enough.
I wonder how a child growing up in such circumstances will treat his or her employees in the future?
When voice commands first became a thing, I found myself speaking in a respectful voice and often thanking Siri for her help. Siri never replied. The engineers who developed her apparently hadn’t bothered to work “you’re welcome” into her vocabulary.
Thus, my politeness fell on deaf ears.
And although this type of software is supposed to be intelligent, i.e., it learning from interacting with us, in my experience our robotic friends are in no way learning to be more polite.
As for humans, when we are not rewarded for being polite, we tend to become less so over time. Gradually, for example, I’ve learned to issue simple straight-out commands to my voiced units. There is no point in engaging in social niceties with an entity that doesn’t respond accordingly, is there?
But what I am conditioning myself to become?
When it comes to the people who have designed the relevant software in this case, many of them value direct, logical and blunt sentences. Social skills simply are not at a premium during an intense Agile development cycle.
As our society populates the environment with robots, maybe the ultimate effect will be that nobody will have much of a reason to be nice anymore.
This would, of course, resemble our political culture, where it seems politeness and respect for others became extinct some time ago.
Indeed, being not nice is often a virtue in modern America. And those who cheer on the misogynist, racist, homophobic demagogues at political rallies? They resemble nothing so much as robots.
The news summaries in an age like this might as well be compiled by robots as well, but in fact I’ve done the ones that follow in the old-fashioned way. They are hand-picked. Please enjoy them.
HEADLINES:
US, Iran agree to ceasefire, sending stock futures higher and oil lower (Yahoo)
Iran war day 109: Tehran, Washington, sign MoU electronically (Al Jazeera)
Trump Winds Down the War He Started With Goals Unmet (NYT)
Trump’s Iran Deal Is a Humiliation for Him—and Good News for the World (Nation)
Authorities in southern Lebanon warned people displaced by three months of war between Israel and Hezbollah against rushing home despite the US-Iran deal, as Israel said it would not withdraw troops from the south. (Reuters)
82nd Airborne Deployment to Israel Went Unannounced (Military.com)
FBI foiled alleged plot to attack White House UFC event, Kash Patel says (NBC)
Eight Crew Members Dead in B-52 Crash at Air Force Base (NYT)
‘An awkward family gathering’: Trump and G7 leaders convene in France amid geopolitical divergences (CNN)
Newsom Says Trump’s Justice Department Is Investigating Him and His Wife (NYT)
Inside the Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan to Take Over Greenland (New Yorker)
Trump ties FISA renewal to his stalled voting bill (Axios)
Inside the Trump administration’s rapid rollback of gun regulations (WP)
Voters are turning out against toxic pesticides. Will the Senate listen? (The Hill)
As the U.S. turns 250, this historian has blunt advice: ‘America has to grow up’ (NPR)
Vance’s fraud task force is sweeping up legitimate small businesses (WP)
Britain Announces Social Media Ban for Children (NYT)
What the ‘60 Minutes’ fiasco reveals about press freedom today (The Hill)
‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ Ratings Show Huge, Dramatic Swing (Yahoo)
MLB sends warning letter to three Giants relievers for their anti-Pride Night protest (McCovey Chronicles)
The US Government Is Letting a Key Data Center Regulation Expire (Wired)
How a warning from Amazon led the White House to shut down Anthropic’s Mythos model (Fortune)
AI robots can go rogue – a researcher on how easily it happens (Conversation)
Bots Now Outnumber Humans on the Internet. Here’s What That Actually Means (CNET)
Why AI Is Incorrigibly Didactic (Atlantic)
How to Run a News Company in the Age of Polarization and A.I. Slop (NYT)
One could ask chatGPT to always try to answer in a kind and understanding fashion (I suspect this is already the case). But then it might sound like it condones bad behavior in some cases. Hopefully its "guardrails" would prevent this from happening.