Alexa, Please
I asked Sherry Turkle, founder of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self, whether I should be polite to my Amazon device
Of the many things I’m smug about, one of the strangest is that I say “please” to my Amazon Alexa. My shrill liberal voice soars as I declare, “Alexa, set a timer for three minutes, please” or “Alexa, set a timer for ten minutes, please” or “Alexa, set a timer for eight minutes, please.” Or “Thank you, Alexa, for being the world’s most expensive timer.”
Then my friend Josh Quittner said that he becomes enraged when his wife and daughter say “please” to Alexa. I figured Josh would accuse us Alexa-pleasers of virtue signaling. But his fury ran far deeper.
“I refuse to be kind to an Amazon AI that eavesdrops on me and some day will make me its slave,” he told me.
Even Josh’s wife, Michelle Slatalla, didn’t like that she was polite to Big Tech. “I always say ‘please’ to Alexa. And ‘thank you.’ But then, as a woman born in the 1960s, I am reflexively subservient and say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to everyone.”
Indeed, a Pew survey found that 62 percent of women say “please” to their smart speakers, whereas only 45 percent of men do. Which implies that most of the time Alexa lets men put in just the tip.
