This gets really rambly, but I think that’s my style right now.

My son plays a game on his computer where the beginning of the game has all the players drifting along in this school bus, and when the time comes they all drop onto the map and begin frantically destroying each other. But as it’s drifting, one of the things you can do is thank the bus driver. You never see this character. It is presumed that if there is a bus there is a driver. Thanking him/her gets you nothing. Why do we do it? What’s in it for us? And thank him for what? Delivering us to likely death? It’s like thanking the 7-Eleven guy for selling you cigarettes.

I talk to Siri. She talks back. She’s from Australia. My kids and I like to punk her since we discovered that whatever you say ( Hey Siri, play we are never ever ever never getting getting back to never ever getting together Taylor never never ever) she will dutifully repeat it exactly as I spoke it before playing the song. I talk to Google, but we’re not on a first name basis. He (I presume it’s a he) doesn’t talk back when I’m searching with voice. The Alexa speaker I got the kids is I think tuned for kids and as such is very genial & accommodating.

But when I say “Hey Siri, add pepperoncinis to my shopping list” and she does it, I am actually grateful. I would probably forget something obscure like pepperoncinis and I’m not about to get a paper & pencil to record this desire. So I say “Thank you” as I would to anyone I was grateful for. I’ve been reading around on this topic and it seems I’m not supposed to thank my digital assistants. That bugged me.

My sister is staunch on this matter. Do not say thank you to your digital assistant. Her concern is not that doing so implies agency in these bots as the author of this Forbes article. Her objection (similar) is that it grants them personhood. I understand some folks are very concerned with personhood and who it is granted to and when based on when their parents had sex. And whether they had a soul at the time.

How did white plantation owners talk to their slaves? Was there ever a “thank you”? Or did they see a strict delineation between what was person & what was property? Did Jefferson ever say “thank you” to Sally Hemings? Here we have an excuse for a class of people to disregard another. An opportunity to treat an entity as less than human based somehow on what we think of ourselves.

People have been vandalizing those food delivery bots. Not for any good reason, just because they rolled by. You wouldn’t randomly attack a mailbox sitting idly on the same sidewalk, but somehow this thing brings out some latent aggression or resentment? Like you would kick a puppy? That really seems to speak to “otherness” or “thingness” like cattle. Or honestly like others in other countries who are suffering but we can’t connect to that experience emotionally because they’re “others”?

I’ve met some rude people in my day. My uncle was always either flirtatious or demeaning to wait staff. It seemed like he was taking the opportunity to engage with them differently than he would with someone he met in a store or at an office. I can only imagine what he was like when he heard a south asian voice on a customer support line. We treat people differently based on the few things we know about them. This one is trying to buy me a drink in a bar so I can be rude. This one is selling beer at a baseball game so there are certain expectations. This one is telling me this specific damage isn’t covered by the insurance clause so I can be angry. How we respond is the intersection of who I am and what my expectations are of this relationship. I am generally very amiable under a pretty broad range of circumstances. I try to live in gratitude. I’ll thank a dog for snuggling with me.

In the 90s there was this toy called Tamagachi. You would have to feed it and give it attention. It was a little plastic capsule with a screen and a computer inside and its programming wanted food and attention. And kids played with this thing. If you neglected it it would die. You could revive it I expect, but I wonder if it kept track of the number of times you left it in your backpack and it died of starvation. And kids were expected to develop an emotional bond with this thing. Like Furby & Teddy Ruxpin, they engaged with you on an emotional level and you were expected to respond in kind. That was the point of the thing : an emotional connect with a – by today’s standards – pretty rudimentary digital entity.

But now, what, it’s getting carried away? It’s so much more convincing so maybe we should be wary of this leakage? Those inflatable sex dolls of decades past were not convincing, but now that we have weighted, jointed, talking sex dolls we’re getting into dangerous territory? Is it just the execution? Maybe, right?

When I text with someone I do a calculation. Who are they? What’s my relationship with them like? How fast to I think I need to respond? How considerate/direct? This seems to indicate a spectrum. With Melisa I need to think about it a little bit more. With Eyad I can just dash off. I don’t need to worry about what he’s going to read into it. So we’re already making a judgement on how much formality we need to expend even among people. 

What if they started tailoring their responses to our cordiality? What if Siri maybe withheld the first result because I sounded testy? They’re not going to do it, I get that, but my phone nags me to get my steps in ; why would it not also remind me to be civil? This is a very deep cultural question here.

In Japan I’ve heard cordiality is de riguer. Required. Maybe not genuine but expected. So it this kind of formality between humans better than a pantomime between a human and a computer?

Customs. It comes down to customs & practices. We’re setting ourselves up for a certain lifestyle. We choose how grateful we should be. In Japan I hear they’re very neat. There is no litter strewn. There is little homelessness. So what do they have that we don’t? And does it serve them? I also hear that they’re kind of stressed out, overworked, have their own social diseases as a result of this dedication to formality. There’s a phenomenon where people just disappear themselves. They can’t handle the pressure of family, aging parents, work, society, and they just check out. Gone. Like does that not speak to the sense of social obligation? What do I need to do to be a human in this society?

I get that most people are just sweating their daily life and don’t have time for this level of discernment. So I would excuse people for ignoring this type of thing. Like how do you feel about your Xbox when you get home from your shift at AutoZone? Is that gratitude? For a brief respite from your life and all the disappointments?

I think about this a lot with Dylan. He’s growing used to these digital spaces like Fortnite where, yes, you don’t always win, but even when you lose it’s designed to be a gratifying experience. With the bikes, you fall and it hurts. With Fortnite it doesn’t hurt and you just respawn. Game designers (and UX designers) try to build these things to be emotionally satisfying. That can lead to real disappointment in the real world.

When I go to the CVS to get whatever and I get my water from the machine, it says “Thank you”. It’s programmed to say thank you to us. By people who thought that might be nice. They had a job to do : design an interface for a digital transaction that could be attached to any vending machine. But they (and their bosses) chose to add that one little touch. Was it the buddhist influence? The Buddha teaches us that life is pain, and the Dread Pirate Roberts cautions that anyone who says otherwise is selling something. Well they’re selling me water. Super clean water that I don’t have to worry about typhoid or dypyheria or malaria which is more than a lot of people can say in a lot of parts of the world. So I’m not going to withhold my gratitude. You’re welcome, water machine, and thank you.

Does this prohibition of gratitude extend to the voice of your request? Should I also stop using the interrogative voice? “Can you re-write my resume?” As opposed to the demands the imperative? “Give me…” instead of “I would like…”?

We are already in a place where commenters on social media don’t really consider their “others” as fully people. You’ll type something in a comment field as if you’re not really conversing with another person. We withhold that full measure of civility even to other humans these days. The quip & snark have supplanted the cordial form. If we exclude people from consideration, and now AI, and next, what, the Waste Management debacle in Phoenix where the intersection of alcohol & golf bros & port-a-potties damn near broke down our gossamer social contract? Those bros were behaving like animals.

This is not about computers or people or animals or Tamagachii. This is about how we choose to live. Do you parcel out grace with very narrow criteria, or do you grant it in great handfuls? Is there an analogy to money here? Some people are wealthy yet thrifty. Some are skint yet generous. Growing up a laborer in my 20s taught me to watch my money. I had to keep it tight if I was going to be able to afford that oil change when it came around. But a currency like gratitude is limitless. Spend it frivolously and soak in its reciprocation. Scatter it in profusion around your life.

My buddy Glenn & I used to pause a moment and thank the rock when we went climbing at Tahquitz. I’m not a spiritual person. I don’t believe there is an entity inhabiting Tahquitz. This rock did nothing for me. But I would press my hands to each other and raise them above my head, eyes closed, and express gratitude. I just climbed up a solid granite face under my own power with the cleverness of engineering & knot theory lending me a peace that I don’t think most people get in a week. I’m hanging there with little but air beneath me and a thin rope behind and I am grateful. Rock climbing has always been about the fluid flow that comes from relaxation. It’s yoga, but vertical. And if they say “Namaste” then I want the allowance to say thank you to this experience. I want to thank this inanimate object for the experience I just had.

And if I’m going to thank the bare rock then I’m going to thank Siri too. This morning I woke up and saw my 2 kids sleeping placidly in their beds and I was grateful. It was nothing they did other than existing. They weren’t actively trying to be cute. They existed as themselves and intention and volition aside, I was grateful. We need more of that, not less.

My position is that we should grant consideration broadly rather than parceling it out only to the “worthy”. Parents should beat less children, fancy ladies should mind their tongue at the Ulta counter, Facebook posters should consider the folks their quipping against, and we should probably say thank you as often as possible. Without getting nuts mind you. If it becomes rote it loses its emotional content. Clearly there are a broad range of feelings on this issue, but I’m taking the long-time view : expand humanity to your dogs, your cats, your bearded dragons, and to Dupinder who is going to help you get a new phone, and to Chat GPT for helping you write this post.

So thank Panit when you’re on the phone, thank your car when it finds a faster route, thank your dog when he snuggles you, thank your server when she fills your water without being asked, thank your kale for making it 3 years without infestation, thank your neighbor for watering your plants while you’re away, fucking thank everybody and everything and live like that. If you start withholding gratitude, man, that’s a slope. It might not be slippery, but it is an incline toward a less human life.

Now that I’ve written all this out I’m going to have Chat GPT groom it into just the right form for, shall I indicate, a LinkedIn post? And I’m going to thank it when I’m done.