Whether it’s a suit that augments your muscles, a driverless car, or an artificially intelligent assistant, any technology that asks us to cede what we could once only do for ourselves will need to understand our mores. Those designs will have to understand what’s appropriate or tactful or simply nice, because that’s the way humans build trust. While politeness seems like a trivial detail, it is a design constraint as real as the heat tolerance of steel or the melting point of plastic.
