I vividly remember the first time a colleague asked for my email address – I didn’t have one yet, and I wasn’t alone. Email was new, and with it came a host of new issues. Was an email note an okay substitute for a handwritten letter? Or a phone call? When our phones gave us Siri, we wondered if we should say “please and “thank you” to “her.” Those questions have been answered by the passage of time – we couldn’t exist without email or Siri. So today’s technology questions are all about the new etiquette, ethics, and reality of living in an AI world.
Here’s a personal example. The other day my wife called to schedule a plumbing repair. The voice on the other end of the line introduced herself as “Laura, an Artificial Intelligence Assistant.” She sounded perfectly professional, asked the right questions, and booked the appointment. At the end of the conversation, “Laura” cheerfully signed off with, “Have a nice day.”
My wife hung up and turned to me: “Am I supposed to say, ‘You, too’ to an AI assistant?”
Artificial intelligence is moving so seamlessly into our daily lives that we suddenly have to ask ourselves a host of new questions: social, ethical, even existential. Here are just a few to consider:
- Politeness Protocols
If AI systems say “please” and “thank you,” do we owe them the same courtesy? Does being polite to AI help us maintain civility as humans, or does it train us to blur the line between machine and person?
- Privacy and Boundaries
When a friendly-sounding AI asks, “How can I help you today?” are we more likely to share personal details than we should? Should we guard our words as carefully as we do when speaking to a stranger online? Or maybe even more carefully, since every syllable is being recorded, analyzed, and stored? And will my answers become part of an AI database which will be used to answer the questions others ask?
- Accountability
If the AI schedules the wrong plumber or quotes the wrong price, who’s responsible: the company, the programmer, or the machine? Can you argue with an algorithm the way you’d argue with a human representative?
- Emotional Entanglement
What happens when people start confiding in conversational AIs late at night, using them as companions rather than tools? This was foreseen a dozen years ago in the movie “Her” where the character played by Joaquin Phoenix fell in love with the mechanical, yet very sexy, voice of Scarlett Johansson! Will we form attachments, and if so, what kind of attachments? Are we cheating ourselves—or our relationships—when we seek empathy from software?
- The Question of Disclosure
Is it fair for businesses not to disclose when we’re speaking to an AI? Should there be a universal rule that says: “This call is being handled by artificial intelligence”? Or more to the issue for someone like me, should writers, bloggers, substackers, or other creative types have to disclose they used AI either partially or extensively in their work?
Okay, so now back to my wife’s original dilemma: should you say “You, too” to the AI on the phone? My answer is yes. Not because the AI cares, but because we actual humans should.
Joachim Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson, stars of “Her,” 2013