The other day, I called it an idiot and it replied, "I won't respond to that." I added--for research purposes only!--an ethnic slur about Irishmen, to suit the Irish male voice I've given it. All it lilted back was, "Is there something else I can help you with?" Human servants, despite their lack of power, often found ways of making clear they weren't so patient. We know this from centuries of complaints by their employers. Virginia Woolf's diary, for instance, is filled with gripes about the people who tended her. She and her cook, Nellie Boxhall, fought, resented, fretted over, and cried about each other for nearly 20 years.

Driver rudeness seems associated with certain brands, and AI self-driving cars ought to consider ... [ ] this. What kind of car do you drive? I don't mean whether it is a four-door or two-door, nor whether it is red in color or blue. Specifically, what brand of car do you drive? According to various studies (cited in a moment herein), supposedly the brand of car is a telltale indicator of how rude a driver sits behind the wheel of the vehicle.

Emotions tend to run high in hospitals, and patients or patients' loved ones can be rude to medical professionals when they perceive inadequate care. But berating your child's doctor could have harmful -- even deadly -- consequences, according to new research. The findings by University of Florida management professor Amir Erez and doctoral student Trevor Foulk reinforce their prior research that rudeness has "devastating effects on medical performance," Erez said. A Johns Hopkins study estimated that more than 250,000 deaths are attributed to medical errors in the U.S. annually--which would rank as the third-leading cause of death in the U.S., according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some errors could be explained by a doctor's poor judgment due to a chronic lack of sleep.

I became highly confused the first time I used the Amazon Echo, a voice-activated "smart home assistant" that sits in the corner and responds to the name Alexa – as in "Alexa, play some music!" or "Alexa, how many ounces in a kilogram?" Partly, this was because the only person I know who owns an Echo is herself called Alexa, and she was home at the time. That is, unless you start young. "We love our Amazon Echo… but I fear it's also turning our daughter into a raging asshole," the Silicon Valley investor Hunter Walk fretted recently. Alexa doesn't need you to say please or thank you; indeed, she responds better to brusque commands.