Rehearsing for AI

I said "please" to my computer today.

Typed it right into Claude, no hesitation. "Please craft this current email response with a more professional tone." Hit enter. Got what I needed. Moved on.

Then I caught myself. That's not a command you give a tool. That's how you talk to an assistant. A colleague. A person.

Nobody taught me to do that. It just happened.

Email taught me to be polite to inboxes. Slack taught me to @-mention software like it was a teammate. Siri taught me to say "please" to a speaker.

By the time Claude showed up, we already knew how to treat it. We'd been rehearsing for twenty years.

Now I can't stop wondering what we're rehearsing for next.