If one says "please" automatically in every situation even when talking to speech recognition software, it is possible they don't mean it when they talk to humans.
Maybe I'm the weird one here but I sometimes say "please" to my computer and mean it. I sometimes do that with objects too. It isn't some deep belief or anything like that, but just something I do because I like to show empathy for objects that have served me well.
For example, even without tone, there's quite significant difference between:
- Give me a pen please.
- Can you give me a pen please?
- Please give me a pen.
You can teach kids to mechanically pronounce correct words, but that is not hard, even a parrot can to do that. But teaching to express and recognize emotions is much harder and Alexa won’t help with that (may even do worse, although unlikely).
In your examples, if all 3 were said in the same, monotonous tone, 2 is much nicer to hear, especially compared to just 'give me a pen', which is how most people order food.
Interactions with software are a really bad proxy for teaching kids how to behave around other humans.
You've not presented any kind of argument. "This is a terrible idea" .. why?
"Be polite all of the time" has certainly been a lot easier to teach my own kids than "only be polite some of the time, because being polite all of the time is a bad thing"
It goes right up there with the philosophy of every thing deserves respect, even the things you don't like.
What I'm saying here is that you're teaching your values, but your values aren't universal. Other parents will teach their values, or simply set examples of behaviors that you disagree with. You can't simply solve the problem by teaching your kids. And if my experience is at all typical, your kid will also pick up values from those other people's kids.
There's no difference between telling children to always be polite to machines and telling children to always beware of foreigners. Both require obedience and shutting off critical insight. You are dehumanizing the world to them. This is why I took the time to write so many responses.
Also it's pretty normal to phrase things less politely to close acquaintances a lot of the time, and that's not being a dick either. "Be polite all the time" is overkill.
> Just teach them to say please to Alexa et Al. Much easier and generally better to be polite when you don't need to be, than to be impolite when you're supposed to be, by mistake.
Jesus wept at how contrived you are making this.
First off, everyone deserves basic respect and to be treated with dignity. Animals deserve respect and dignity as well (although we don't say "please" and "thank you" to them - I'll get to that in a moment). But you said "everything" deserves respect. That is not true.
You don't teach politeness, or manners, or anything else, as a series of actions to repeat unthinkingly. You teach by forcing them to consider the reasons for doing certain things. There are obvious reasons to be polite to other people. First of all, other people understand what "please" means. Animals don't, and computers aren't sentient. But over-archingly, the value behind treating others with respect and animals with dignity is that life has value. Degrading other living things is ultimately degrading ourselves. If we don't treat them with dignity, what can we expect in return?
Now, if you want to argue that Amazon Alexa is a sentient being worthy of polite respect, that would be a different question. But the argument against teaching a child to be respectful to a machine goes beyond just the obvious dystopian implications. The ultimate reason it's a bad idea is that like any form of obedience training that leads to irrational outcomes, it is ultimately rejected and ignored, because the logic and rules behind it were not inculcated, only the actions.
To sum up: You don't teach rules by teaching how to follow them. You teach rules by teaching why they exist, and when to apply them. A child who says "please" and "thank you" to a machine has not learned any values or learned the point of why we say those things to each other. In fact, it makes the words meaningless. If all you want is obedience and you think your kid isn't bright enough to learn when and when not to apply certain behaviors, then you can try a shotgun approach, but you won't end up with someone capable of thinking for themselves. To me, raising an autonomous person capable of making judgments about new situations is the goal of child-rearing, but then again, I'm not an authoritarian.
[edited for typos]
Yes you do. Everyone and everything is deserving of respect at all times, especially the ones/things you disagree with, or dislike. The same is of every thing from animals to material objects, lest they wantonly waste and/or damage stuff.
This is why _every_ democracy in the world demands their politicians act with respect to their opposition. Some honor these rules more than others, yes, before you quote some breakdown of the process somewhere.
Which renders the rest of your post pointless nonsense.
You sure aren't shy of expending the effort to rationalize your decision to be be a baseline dick, reserving politeness for special circumstance, on the internet to strangers.
Strawman.
> unthinking compliance with senseless
Neither unthinking nor senseless.
> ugly, disrespectful of thought and actually immoral
Absolute hogwash. What terrible reasoning you're just now coming up with.
> Strawman.
You explicitly said the difference between Alexa and a toaster is that the toast doesn't speak. It's reasonable to assume that you believe that the difference between Alexa and a toaster is that the toast doesn't speak.
> > unthinking compliance with senseless
> Neither unthinking nor senseless.
Following rules you were taught without evaluating whether they actually make sense in context is the definition of unthinking.
> Absolute hogwash. What terrible reasoning you're just now coming up with.
That is disrespectful. I'm starting to believe you don't actually understand the concept of respect.
Like your rule for being polite at all times being "senseless" or "ridiculous" or any other superlative you could think of without any rational reasoning whatsoever, you mean?
Sure. I can agree with that.
Speech recognition software responds to any voice it was trained to. It will respond to dog barking or morse code it there will be a demand.
It responds to "humanly" speech, but it likely mostly ignores the tone. (Although, I imagine eventually Alexa will learn to start different music depending on the tone of the person asking to play the music.)
> It's the very reason people want software assistants to have human voices, even female voices, because it makes them feel more at ease.
No, it's different reason. Human to assistant and assistant to human is not symmetrical.
It's hard to retrain humans to respond to a different form of speech, but it's easy to retrain the model to whatever is needed/used by users.