CR5 Issue 160 Sept 2018

expect the person to pick up on
subtle cues and don’t want to
have an outright conversation/
confrontation about it.”
Media personality Stephen Fry
has been dubbed ‘the most
polite man in Britain’, but when
he was interviewed a few
years ago, he admitted to BBC
presenter Mark Lawson that he
feels slightly ambivalent about
that title. “Being over-polite is
not attractive, necessarily … I
can’t watch someone not saying
thank you, and I can’t not say it
myself. If I noticed I hadn’t said
it, I’d have to come back in the
room and say ‘thank you’. It’s
feeble!”
So if Stephen Fry – an icon of
good manners – feels that being
too polite is a problem, what will
become of the rest of us? Is there
a chance that we’ll eventually
reject this quintessentially
British behaviour in favour of
a more direct (some would
say more honest) approach? It
doesn’t look as though this will
happen any time soon. A recent
report published by research
company Childwise looked at
the way children interact with
the artificial intelligence bots
in devices such as phones and
tablets, and the findings have
caused concern for many British
parents.
Researchers found that children
were barking commands at their
robotic helpers without using
“please” and “thank you”, and
concluded that such behaviour
might encourage these children
to become aggressive and
impolite when they reach
adulthood.
In response to Childwise’s
findings, Amazon has now
included a politeness feature
(known as ‘Magic Word’) in its
Echo Dot software and it’s likely
that other tech companies will
soon follow Amazon’s lead.
So with robots getting in on the
act, it’s unlikely that we’ll forget
our “pleases” and “thank yous”
in future.
In fact, as the technology
develops, it may even become
easier to tell a stranger that he’s
standing on your foot: simply get
your unfailingly polite robot to
speak to him for you.
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