Friday, August 18, 2023

Are Manners Obsolete?

 (I first published an earlier version of this essay three years ago in August 2020.)

One legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic will almost certainly be 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 those around us.

It starts, as do all things, with the children. Kids quickly learn to ask Siri or Aleza 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 answered. 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 learns 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, I‘m not sure that words like gracious, polite, or well-mannered are the first to pop into mind. I don't mean to be impolite, but many of these folks are direct, logical and on occasions outright rude. After all, social skills simply are not at a premium for anyone 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 utterly extinct some time back. 

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, I guess, but in fact I’ve done the ones that follow in the old-fashioned way. So please enjoy them. 

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