During one Passover visit to see my American cousins, I was taken aback when, having asked Alexa to play music, her response to me saying “please” was a surprisingly flirtatious commentary on my good manners.
I don’t say please to a smart speaker because I think that the sound system’s feelings will be hurt otherwise. I do it because the rule that when you ask for something, you should say please, has been so ingrained in me that it has become a muscle memory.
So how polite should we be to machines? One answer is contained within my accidental flirting with Amazon’s smart assistant: politeness, courtesy and treating others with dignity are not just moral choices, they are matters of habit. We should practice them at all times because if we grow accustomed to barking demands at computers we will soon start doing it to human beings, too.