Thanks to AI, politeness matters more than ever
Doing the hard thing is becoming special
Hi all,
Thank you for reading Signals & Stories. Going forward, I’ll be sending out my newsletter on a monthly basis. Thanks for reading and have a good start to the week!
—Brendan
Brendan’s MBA
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Burn the Playbooks: Packy McCormick notes fewer young people are reading for fun and more of them are starting copy-cat new businesses. He writes, “[S]uccess has become overplaybooked. […] AI will follow playbooks better than we can. Anything that we playbook becomes more legible to AI. So we must burn the playbooks. This is the real Butlerian Jihad, not destroying the machines, but destroying the playbooks that would turn us into machines.”
The Valley of Death: Research-heavy entrepreneurs should be prepared for a funding desert once an idea is out of the lab but hasn’t yet earned the traction to attract professional investors:
Staying grounded: “The skillset needed to win a top spot in the meritocracy is not the same as the skillset or character-set needed to wake up with a sense that life is a profound gift. Those who have a service posture, those who are capable of feeling awe, those who are capable of forming meaningful, committed relationships, those with a strong sense of self...these are the people on whom our future culture depends. ‘Light is sewn for the righteous and irrepressible joy for the upright of heart.’ (Psalm 97:11).” —Rabbi Zohar Atkins
Thanks to AI, politeness matters more than ever
Digital technology has normalized impolite social behaviors that used to be considered rude. We read texts while in a conversation. We look at our computer while listening to a live speaker or professor. We cancel last minute (or don’t show up) because it’s through an app. In this fast-paced, machine-driven world, we don’t always offer others the baseline human attention they deserve. And it’s considered acceptable, because we’re busy.
This trend opens the door for politeness to become a unique strength. People who resist digital temptations and still do the polite human thing—listen attentively, speak thoughtfully, and communicate respectfully—are more likely to stand out.
I recently had a career conversation with a successful business executive. “Brendan, I’m sorry to do this, but I’ll have to end our conversation a few minutes early to take an urgent phone call. I really enjoyed our conversation, so please connect with me on LinkedIn so we can keep in touch.” Rather than “dropping early”, he chose the polite, personal approach, which pleasantly surprised me.
As digital technology has enabled an entitlement to effortless convenience at the expense of effortful politeness, we have become accustomed to treating people just a bit like the machines in our pockets. We can pay attention to them when we want to. We can tune them out or turn them off if we need to. We can retreat into our filtered digital world, with its endless supply of fawning followers and cheap levity, instead of navigating the messiness of real human relationships.
Digital technology has normalized impoliteness.
And artificial intelligence takes this challenge and squares it.
“Built into your iPhone, iPad, and Mac to help you write, express yourself, and get things done effortlessly.”
Imagine if most of the texts and emails you receive going forward are actually written by large language models (LLMs). The people on the other side now only spare you a fraction of their consciousness—how lucky you are!—to communicate with you. Do you think effortless LLM-generated texts and emails will make you feel valued? Will they make you feel listened to? Or human? In many cases, you may not notice. But there will definitely be certain serious messages you receive that miss the mark. The other party clearly isn’t listening or understanding, and that will be a frustrating, disheartening feeling.
If AI further seeps into our digital technology workflows, I predict it will make us twice more efficient but 50% less empathetic when communicating with other humans.
As we “get more things done”—not actually because expectations for higher productivity will fill newly available free time—we’ll wonder why it doesn’t feel as rewarding as it once did to communicate with others. As we join everyone else adopting these tools, it’ll no longer seem impolite to send people automated, possibly thoughtless emails or texts. Our standards for politeness in communication are at risk of eroding, imperceptibly day by day, until we find ourselves locked into increasingly algorithmic communications optimized for efficiency but malnourished of human feeling.
Doing the hard, inefficient thing, the polite thing—spending extra time to communicate with people in a personalized, human way—will become special.
We’re already starting to see this happen with job applications. Job-seekers leveraging ChatGPT and AI agents now blast-apply to hundreds of jobs per hour, flooding helpless recruiters with robotic resumes. Many companies are now adding mandatory short answer questions (and even videos) to filter for people who are truly interested. In other words, they’re making the process more human, and by corollary, more inefficient.
Generative AI is an impressive research, productivity, and creativity tool. I, like millions, use it every day. But we should be wary of depending on AI to communicate with others, lest we treat them even more like machines. Relationships need less efficiency, not more. Politely show other people that they matter to you by writing personalized notes and listening to what they have to say. As some begin to outsource their empathy to AI, those who still put in the effort will build the strongest, most human relationships.
Thanks for reading!
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—Brendan