You Should Say “Please” to Your Virtual Assistant
You should do it not just because you are polite, but because of power imbalance
I watch videos on the virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant and Siri. The most interesting aspect of the interactions between human and machine is that no one says “please” to the virtual assistants in all those demo videos.
“Alexa, remind me to pick up my daughter from soccer practice at 3pm”.
“Cortana, when does the sun set today?”
“Ok Google, play my workout playlist.”
“Hey Siri, google Alexa.”
Etc.
Where is the “please”? Where is the “can you please …” or “please tell me…”?
If you were talking to a person, it is impolite to not say “please” after a request, simply because there is no absolute obligation for that person to comply with your request. “Please”, or being polite, is a motivator.
Even if you are talking to your own personal assistant, given that your personal assistant is only your employee, s/he only has employment obligation to carry out your will. And s/he can rightfully deny your request by breaking the employment contract. You can sue your employee to oblivion for breach of contract, if s/he refuses to carry out reasonable requests within the employment contract, but there is simply no absolute obligation that your employee carries out your will.
This is all nice in theory anyway, employees in many workplaces, especially women, feel powerless to deny unreasonable requests from their bosses outside of their employment contract. Just ask victims of Harvey Weinstein.
The contractual relationship with virtual assistants, I would argue, is that between you and the corporations that provide the virtual assistant. You bought a service from Amazon/Apple/Google/Microsoft. That consumer contract can be terminated, and you have no absolute right to demand service from them. Therefore being polite to them is again a motivator so that the virtual assistant, and hence the corporations, will comply with your requests.
Now you may say: “there is no person involved, only a machine hearing me speak. This is not like a bank employee listening to my demand for banking service. I need to be polite to the person involved but not the corporation.”. However, the programmers of the virtual assistants would know whether you are rude to the virtual assistant. The people monitoring the metrics of the virtual assistants would know. There ARE people involved. It is just not a one-to-one relationship.
I would also argue that the power dynamics between you and the corporations providing you the virtual assistant service is so much more one-sided. If you are a banking customer, you can easily take all your money and switch bank. However your virtual assistant and hence the corporations hold your very personal data and know your every whims. And the corporations have a habit of keeping your data for a long time rather than letting you have absolute control over your own data. From a power perspective, they have all the cards while you have almost nothing to bargain for their cooperation. Therefore a little politeness is the least you can give to not irritate these corporations.
If my argument does not convince you, then maybe think about the day AI turns rogue. AI knows exactly how many times you talked to it and treat it rudely. It has perfect memory in the cloud. You have been warned.
“Please Alexa, don’t use me as a human battery.”
