Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Nicole James
“Recently, I said, ‘Thank you,’ to my printer. Not because it did anything heroic, unless printing out a mildly off-center PDF counts as gallantry, but because I’m apparently the kind of person who anthropomorphizes anything with a plug. You’d think this sort of thing would stop with childhood dinosaurs (the remote-controlled ones), but no. Now, we’re all doing it …. Politeness, says Dr. Eduardo Benitez Sandoval, a social robotics researcher at UNSW Sydney’s School of Art & Design, isn’t just about manners. It’s about modeling good behavior even with things that don’t have feelings. Because once we’re barking at Alexa like a boot-camp sergeant, we’re one step closer to morphing into those people who send angry emails to customer service before reading the FAQ. And from there, it’s a slippery slope to snapping your fingers at waiters and calling it ‘constructive feedback.'” (06/02/25)
https://fee.org/articles/being-polite-to-robots-might-kill-us-all-but-in-a-really-lovely-way/