AI: It’s Just Like Us

My daughter recently listened to someone teach how to get the best answers from an AI large language model chatbot. She learned that you’re likely to get more useful and more professional answers if you ask the machine politely. This is probably because, when you use expletives, the chatbot takes cues from your language and draws its answers from datasets with material that corresponds to your tone and level of politeness. 

Just like us.

AI is modeled on the way humans write and talk. It is our mirror, an amalgamation of everything we’ve put on the internet. If you feed it a request in a hostile or demanding way, naturally it will draw from the pool of information it has that sounds hostile and demanding. .

This makes sense because when we are attacked, we react with an older, differently organized part of the brain than when we interact with someone who engages us in a polite, non-threatening way. (Imagine the difference between coming home to a partner who says, “Hey honey, where did you go this morning?” versus one who says, “Where the [bleep] have you been all day?”)

The Origins of Politeness

The word polite comes from the word politeia, the Greek word for the city or state where men solved problems that their city/state had by discussing it in a calm and rational council. (In a strange linguistic twist, the word politic has the same root but now has a very different connotation after having been mangled over some centuries!)

So what does it mean today to be polite? To engage in discussions with others in a calm and considerate way. Politeness is important because it’s an expression of respect, which is a requirement for civilized people to arrive at a mutually agreed upon solution. When people – including lawmakers! – are not polite during discussions, progress comes to a grinding halt.

Instead of plunging into a hypothetical scenario, let’s look at the real-life show put on for us when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene attacked fellow legislator Rep. Jasmine Crockett during a House Oversight Committee panel (watch it here). I would be amazed if anyone remembers what this panel was actually convened to discuss, but it really devolved when Greene said to Crockett, “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”

This caused a huge eruption, with a third congresswoman, Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, “mov[ing] to take down Ms. Greene's words. That is absolutely unacceptable. How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person.” Rep. Greene then hurled insults about AOC’s intelligence, and the motion to strike both comments was ultimately refused.

Angry with the refusals, Rep. Crockett came back with, “I'm just curious, just to better understand your ruling, if someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody's bleach blonde, bad build, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?” After more mayhem, someone finally said, “Mr. Chairman, this is out of control. We should adjourn, Mr. Chairman.”

Of course they needed to adjourn! Even in a place that’s supposed to be as civilized as the U.S. House of Representatives, when insult someone rather than engaging in polite, civilized conversation, all ability to have productive discussions is lost. An attack like those hurled in the House committee hearing wakes up the Snake Brain. This is the ancient part of our brains, the limbic system, that uses pattern recognition to respond to threats. That’s why politeness is so essential to productive conversation: it maintains an atmosphere of mutual respect and keeps a conversation from veering off into personal attacks and counterattacks. 

Politeness Outside of Politics

Polite discussion is the only way for people to engage in productive conversations – even outside of politics – because this is how we engage our Sage Brains. When confronted by a person in a threatening way, our old and trusty Snake Brain is called up to bat because it has a phenomenally quick automatic response mechanism designed to save you in a life-threatening emergency. And it works!

But the Snake Brain is not an all-purpose tool that you can use if you are trying to engage in finding optimal long-term solutions. Here are its constraints: 

First, the Snake Brain cannot grasp time, but an understanding of time is needed to engage in causal, and therefore rational, thinking. The Snake Brain can produce an adequate single-step reaction to a situation, but never a long-term solution. It cannot understand the full context of the situation it’s in. That requires more than pattern recognition, it requires recognizing the cause of a threat, and from there using multi-step logic to solve the problem.

Second, the Snake Brain is not a social creature. Reptiles do not run in packs, they do not hunt together, they do not even take care of their young. They are truly egocentric. And that works for the survival of reptiles very well, but is often inadequate for us humans, who must function in societies.

Here’s an example of how arguments play out when the Snake Brain takes over: I often hear couples who’ve been in a horrible fight, where they’ve hurt each other tremendously, declare that they do not even remember how they got into the fight because they’ve lost all sense of time and cannot recount the sequence of events. Then they wonder how such a stupid thing could have made them hurl hurtful insults at each other. It was because their respective Snake Brains identified a  threat from the other person and saw the need to egocentrically defend him- or herself.

That the couple declared their love for each other just an hour before the fight does not register with the Snake Brain because, having no concept of time, it has no working memory of the earlier declaration of love. It’s doing a simple job: defending against the threat occurring now. Furthermore, because the Snake Brain does not understand social bonds, it couldn’t take that love into consideration anyway social bonds don’t register in that part of the brain.

Now imagine that there has been a permanent breach between that couple, one that has led to impending divorce. Should they let their Snake Brains fight that battle since they’re not trying to preserve the relationship?

I’ve seen couples wage all-out war during divorces to try to inflict maximum damage on each other. They’re so absorbed in the fight that they fail to consider the future and how their present behaviors will impact their ability to move forward. Caught in the vice of egocentricity, entire nest eggs have been essentially handed over to divorce lawyers rather than divided between the former couple to establish their future lives.

Conflicts like this are especially painful to watch when there are children involved, and the exes still have to work together as co-parents. While everybody suffers, nobody suffers as much as the children do. They become collateral damage of the war waged by their parents’ massively egocentric Snake Brains.

There are everyday examples of when politeness benefits everyone who participates, too. Consider the (relative) efficiency of how passengers file out of an airplane row-by-row – can you imagine if everyone were in an egocentric rush to exit all at once? There’d be a chaotic stampede. Or how we teach our kids sportsmanlike conduct so they can smoothly go from being on-field competitors to classroom collaborators. This wouldn’t be possible if they were caught in their Snake Brains.

Becoming a Better Reflection of Humanity

As people, we have both the very quick and powerful emergency reactivity of the Snake Brain, as well as the slower but very elaborate and problem-solving approach of the Sage Brain. Nature gave us both and both aspects of the brain are well-suited to their respective functions.

If you want to problem solve or untangle a difficult social situation, you have to use your Sage Brain. But to access that part of the brain, you need to engage others in a polite way.

-E