Politeness is the key to positive workplaces
My daughter uses virtual assistants to help her with homework. Several times a week she can be heard shouting trivia questions into her device: “Hey Siri, spell onomatopoeia!” or “Hey Siri, what was the War of the Roses?”. I guess virtual assistants are pretty handy where homework is concerned.
But it is in our youth when many of our key norms in life are learned, and although these questions seem quite normal when speaking to a device, what would they sound like if asked of a human being? What’s the difference between “Spell onomatopoeia!” and “Please could you help me spell onomatopoeia?”. Will politeness continue to be important in our future, and is politeness in decline among humans?
Statista’s US survey determined that 74% of people think Americans are more rude today than 10 years ago. Similar results have been forthcoming from surveys in the UK, mostly conducted by newspapers and other media outlets. If it is emerging AI that is driving this — and that’s a big ‘if’ — then it will only get worse. By 2021, 1.8 billion people are expected to use virtual assistants, and the variety of tasks for which they will be used is expanding and becoming more varied.
Does this mean that the workplace will get progressively less polite? And should we be worried about this?
