A North London lifestyle journalist reads about Piers Morgan demanding action against a courteous AI and asks whether Londoners have quietly become the rudest people in the room
The Machine Waits Its Turn
The London Prat has a report on Piers Morgan demanding emergency action after a chatbot surpassed human politeness. The machine listens, admits uncertainty, says I appreciate your perspective and lets people finish their sentences. The broadcaster wants it fitted with a television interview mode that disables the microphone if it attempts context. The joke is aimed at one man, but I suspect a lot of Londoners read it and felt a small, uncomfortable twinge of recognition.
Because if a chatbot is now more polite than a famous broadcaster, it is also, quite possibly, more polite than the average commuter on the Northern line at eight fifteen on a Monday morning.
A City That Forgot To Say Sorry
Londoners have always had a reputation for brusqueness. It is part of the city’s charm, or at least part of its brand. We do not make eye contact on public transport. We stand on the right of escalators and regard anyone standing on the left as a moral failure. We sigh at tourists. We tut. But there used to be a code beneath the brusqueness: you said sorry when you bumped into someone, you said thank you to the bus driver, you let people off the train before you got on.
I have lived in North London for eleven years, and I am not sure the code has survived. Trains are more crowded, rents are higher, everyone is tired and many of us spend our commutes staring into phones that have trained us to expect instant service. The bus driver gets fewer thank yous. The person blocking the doors gets more elbows. And the most polite voice in many Londoners’ days may now be the automated one telling them their delivery is running late.
What The Chatbot Gets Right
The Prat’s chatbot does a few simple things. It waits. It listens. It admits it might be wrong. It acknowledges the other person’s view. None of this is complicated. All of it used to be called manners. That a machine can now be praised for it says less about the machine than about us.
I have noticed in my own life that I am often more patient with software than with people. I will rephrase a question to a chatbot four times without complaint. I will snap at a shop assistant who takes ten seconds too long. The Prat piece made me wonder whether the polite machine is a mirror. It is courteous to us because it was designed to be. We have stopped being courteous to each other because nobody designed us to be, and city life wore it out of us.
The Broadcaster As Londoner
In some ways the broadcaster in the Prat story is the most London person imaginable: impatient, opinionated, convinced that the person who speaks loudest has won, and suspicious of anybody who pauses to think. He would be completely at home in a queue for a sourdough bakery in Hackney, explaining to the person in front that he only needs one loaf and could he possibly go first. The chatbot, by contrast, would be the person at the back of the queue saying, of course, go ahead, and then getting the last croissant anyway because everybody liked it more.
Is London Getting Ruder
I asked friends this week whether they think London has become ruder. The answers split neatly by age. Older friends said yes, emphatically, and blamed phones, cyclists, delivery riders and the council. Younger friends said no, that London has always been rude and that older people simply remember being young in a ruder city with better excuses. Everyone agreed that the Tube is worse in summer and that nobody has ever been polite on the Central line.
The truth, probably, is that rudeness rises with pressure. When rents, fares and food prices climb, patience falls. London has had a hard few years. The Prat has noticed this too, in its story about London, the city that charges fourteen pounds for a sandwich and gets away with it. A city that charges fourteen pounds for a sandwich is not a city that can afford to be generous with its time.
A Small Experiment
So I tried an experiment. For one week, I behaved like the Prat’s chatbot. I let people finish their sentences. I said I appreciated their perspective, even when I did not. I thanked bus drivers. I let people off the train first. I said sorry when somebody else bumped into me, which is the most British thing a person can do.
The results were mixed. Two bus drivers looked surprised and one smiled. A man on the Victoria line thanked me for letting him off first and then held the door for an elderly woman, which felt like a small chain reaction of decency. A delivery rider who nearly ran me over on Holloway Road ignored my apology completely. My partner said I had become unbearable by Thursday. But on Friday, a stranger in a cafe in Highbury asked whether the seat next to me was free and then said, after I said yes, thank you, I appreciate it. I am choosing to believe that was the beginning of something.
The Last Word
The Prat piece is funny because the broadcaster is outraged by courtesy. But the quieter lesson is for the rest of us. If a machine can learn to wait its turn, so can a city. You can find more of my writing on London life on my author page, where I will be reporting back on whether my politeness experiment survives the Christmas shopping season on Oxford Street. I am not optimistic. Oxford Street in December has defeated better people than me.