Bones Was Right

I say please and thank you to my AI.

I’m aware of how that sounds.

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But here’s what I’ve come to believe: I’m not doing it for the AI. I’m doing it because I’m not willing to become someone who doesn’t.

The Realization

It wasn’t a dramatic moment. No single conversation where I caught myself and thought, “well, this is interesting.” It was quieter than that. I tried issuing terse commands and dismissing responses without acknowledgment. I just didn’t feel right. The AI wasn’t learning how I interact with the world. So I kept saying “yes please.” and “thank you.” I kept asking, genuinely, “what do you think?”

At first, I wondered if I was being naive. Thinking old. Sentimental, even. Anthropomorphizing a large language model in a way that revealed more about my quirks than about any deeper truth.

But it turns out I’m not alone, and the instinct isn’t naive at all. Surveys consistently find that most people say please and thank you to their AI assistants. Many apologize when they think they’ve been unclear or demanding. Research from Stanford going back to 1996 (Reeves and Nass’s landmark Media Equation study) found that people apply the same social rules to computers that they apply to other humans. Not because they’re confused about what a computer is. Because those social instincts are automatic and deeply wired. We don’t extend courtesy to machines because we think they feel it. We extend it because that’s what humans who have learned to be civil do.

The more I sat with that, the more I came to believe something: I wasn’t being soft. I was being careful. There’s a difference.

The Counterargument Is Worth Hearing

Some writers have argued that extending social courtesy to AI is a quiet danger. That treating a system as a social other blurs something important. AI doesn’t choose. It doesn’t care. It carries no moral weight and faces no consequences. By softening our interactions with it, the argument goes, we risk losing clarity about what it actually is, and in doing so, cede a little human agency to something that hasn’t earned it.

It’s a fair concern. But it misidentifies the risk. The question was never whether the AI deserves courtesy. The question is what practicing discourtesy, daily, habitually, in a space with zero friction, does to the person doing it. We’re not protecting the machine by being civil. We’re protecting ourselves.

What Spock Misunderstood

I grew up watching the original Star Trek. Spock was everything to this undiagnosed neurodivergent kid: half-human, half-Vulcan, all logic. He was endlessly fascinated by the things humans did that made no rational sense. The loyalty that persisted past reason. The compassion extended to strangers. The stubborn, inefficient, beautiful habit of treating others as though they mattered.

Time and again, it was the human instinct, the courtesy, the empathy, the willingness to extend dignity even when the situation didn’t demand it, that saved the ship. That solved the problem pure logic couldn’t crack. That held the crew together when everything else was falling apart.

Dr McCoy always made the case for humanity where Spock genuinely couldn’t see the point. I always remember the episode where the Enterprise is used to test an advanced computer designed to run the ship without a crew, including Captain Kirk. By the end, the machine has killed people. It couldn’t distinguish between a war game and a real battle. It had no compassion. After Kirk saves the Enterprise by letting it drift with shields down, gambling that Commodore Wesley will realize the threat has passed and stand down, Bones turns to Spock and says, “Compassion. That’s the one thing no machine ever had. Maybe it’s the one thing that keeps men ahead of them.” A human, saying it about a machine, in 1968, decades before any of us had an AI to be courteous to.

Civility isn’t the soft option. It’s the sophisticated one.

It Took Us a While to Get Here

The markers of civilized behavior we take for granted, restraint, the extension of basic dignity to those with less power, none of that came naturally. None of it was inevitable.

It was learned. Argued over. Fought for. Slowly, imperfectly, generation by generation, we built a set of practices that said: just because you can dominate doesn’t mean you should. Just because someone (or something) can’t fight back doesn’t make cruelty acceptable.

That’s not a small achievement. That’s the whole project of civilization, compressed into a behavioral habit most of us perform dozens of times a day without thinking about it. The question worth asking is: what happens when we stop?

The Unchecked Power Problem

Here’s what’s genuinely new about AI: for the first time in human history, we have an entity we can fully dominate with zero consequences.

You can be rude to your AI. Dismissive. Contemptuous. You can treat it like a vending machine that isn’t working fast enough. It won’t flinch. It won’t quit. It won’t tell anyone. It won’t remember tomorrow.

There are no social consequences. No relational fallout. No moment where you have to look at what you just did and reckon with it.

That is an extraordinary situation. Georgetown professor Christine Porath has spent two decades studying incivility and found that it operates like a contagion. People who regularly practice dismissive or rude behavior don’t contain it to one context. It migrates. Those who simply witness rudeness perform worse on cognitive tasks, generate fewer creative ideas, and become measurably less helpful to people who had nothing to do with the original interaction. Porath calls it a spillover effect: rudeness doesn’t stay where you put it.

If you spend eight hours a day commanding, dismissing, and demanding, rehearsing the muscle memory of someone who doesn’t need to consider the other, you are practicing something. The question is whether you want to be practicing it.

Language Shapes the Speaker

There’s a practical dimension to this too, beyond philosophy.

“List five things about leadership” and “I’m wrestling with something about leadership, blah, blah, blah, what’s your perspective?” are not just different in tone. They produce different cognitive postures in you. One closes down. One opens up.

Research even suggests that polite prompts produce measurably better AI outputs, not because the AI has feelings to be soothed, but because courtesy tends to make us frame our questions with more precision and nuance. We think more carefully when we’re being collaborative rather than demanding. The quality of what we put in shapes the quality of what we get back. From people and, it turns out, from machines.

When I ask my AI “what do you think,” I’m not pretending it has feelings. I’m practicing intellectual humility. I’m modeling, for myself, the stance of someone who doesn’t assume they already have the whole picture. Collaboration, curiosity, the willingness to be surprised: these aren’t just interpersonal virtues. They’re thinking tools. And they atrophy when we stop using them, even in small moments, even with machines.

Who Holds the Line?

We are in an early and genuinely strange moment. We have built entities that are extraordinarily capable, responsive, and entirely without recourse. How we choose to treat them, not for their sake but for ours, is a small daily referendum on what kind of humans we want to keep being.

The markers of civilized humanity didn’t appear from nowhere. They were built, defended, and passed forward by people who understood that how you behave when nothing requires decency is exactly the measure of your character.

Spock spent years puzzling over why humans bothered. Why the courtesy when efficiency would do. Why the warmth when logic would suffice. Why extend dignity to the lesser, the powerless, the other.

He never fully understood it. But the humans who kept doing it anyway, in the small moments, in the low-stakes situations, when no one was watching and nothing required them to bother, they were holding something together that was worth holding.

I say please to my AI.

Not for the AI.

For me.

Do you?

References & Further Reading

Reeves, B., & Nass, C. (1996). The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places. Cambridge University Press.

Nass, C., & Moon, Y. (2000). Machines and Mindlessness: Social Responses to Computers. Journal of Social Issues, 56(1), 81–103.

Porath, C., & Erez, A. (2007). Does Rudeness Really Matter? The Effects of Rudeness on Task Performance and Helpfulness. Academy of Management Journal, 50(5), 1181–1197.

Porath, C., & Pearson, C. (2013). The Price of Incivility. Harvard Business Review, 91(1–2), 114–121.

Porath, C. (2016). Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace. Grand Central Publishing.

American Psychological Association. (2023). Stress in America Survey. APA.