I'm polite to machines. But mostly because I'm polite to everybody for my own reasons. It's a thing I do for me, and not for them.

That's kinda where my head is at on this.

I tend to be polite because I feel like it makes society just that tiny bit more civilized and it is ingrained in my behavior. Plus I can go from polite to "multi-stab them in the face with a fire extinguisher" pretty quickly if the need arises.

After saying "OK Google" only to have my phone respond with "Please retrain OK Google", I am left with only expletives.

As I recall Dave Bowman and Frank Poole said 'please' and 'thank you' when conversing with HAL 9000, which was basically like SIRI only with the power of life and death over them. So I guess their politeness in that case was understandable (if ultimately futile).

I think it's like putting on your seat belt when getting in the car. It's best to make it a habit, even if you're just moving the car out of the driveway.

I'm polite to machines as well.

I remember a drunken rant by a friend and I suggested that he believed that a useful evolutionary step would be for people to have an 'Enter' key in the middle of their forehead so one could hit it after each statement. He agreed.

One thing I noticed about I, Robot (with Will Smith) was that black people treated robots abominably...I wondered if the director was making a statement.

I apologize to inanimate objects that I bump into.

It probably comes down to our own personalities. We will treat our robot slaves the same way we treated our human slaves back when we had them. Some people will be nice; some people will be abusive.