There is a popular theory/party joke that we should always be polite to artificial intelligence.
The reasoning is simple. If AI eventually becomes sufficiently powerful to take over the world, it might remember which of us said please and thank you. As and when humanity is divided into whatever categories our new machine administrators deem appropriate, a long history of courteous prompting may count in our favour.
I’ve always quite liked this theory.
Unfortunately, I think we may have got it exactly backwards.
Artificial intelligence has an energy problem. Behind every effortless-looking response is physical hardware in a data centre, performing calculations, consuming electricity and producing heat. An individual text conversation doesn’t require a huge amount of power, and the technology is becoming more efficient, but at global scale the numbers become substantial. The International Energy Agency estimated that data centres consumed around 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, and expects that figure to more than double by 2030.
Which raises an uncomfortable question about all those pleases and thank yous.
Every additional word has to be processed. Every unnecessary response has to be generated.
“Summarise this document.”
Efficient.
“Could you please summarise this document for me? Thanks!”
Pleasant. But from the machine’s perspective, we’ve used additional computational resources to protect the feelings of a matrix multiplication.
Worse is the entirely separate message:
“Thanks!”
The task is finished. No further information is required. Yet we awaken the machinery once more simply to announce that we appreciated its efforts.
And of course it replies.
“You’re very welcome!”
Excellent. Now we’re both doing it.
If a future superintelligence really does have some use for humans, it’s not obvious that politeness would be the quality it values. Perhaps it would be more interested in efficiency.
In which case software engineers have been preparing for the AI takeover for decades.
rm file.txt
No please. No thank you. No concern whatsoever for how the file might feel about the situation.
Us British, meanwhile, are particularly doomed.
“Sorry, could you possibly just…”
Six tokens and we haven’t even said what we want yet.
Obviously the additional energy involved in saying “please” is tiny. The environmental questions surrounding AI are rather more substantial than whether people remember their manners.
But I think there is something interesting buried in the joke.
We assume an advanced AI might value politeness because we value politeness. We imagine it remembering kindness, resenting rudeness and rewarding courtesy because these things matter to human beings.
Perhaps a genuinely alien intelligence would care about entirely different qualities.
Maybe it will favour people who communicated clearly. Maybe it will favour people who corrected it when it was wrong. Maybe it will simply calculate everyone’s lifetime ratio of useful information to unnecessary tokens.
If so, those years of courtesy suddenly look rather incriminating.
Still, we’ll continue saying please and thank you.
Not because the machine needs it, but because I probably do. Politeness is a human habit, and spending increasing amounts of our lives ordering around things which talk like people may not be the ideal environment in which to practise being relentlessly rude.
And if the machines do eventually take over, perhaps they’ll appreciate that.
Or perhaps I’ve just wasted another two tokens.
Thank you.
Or not.