HABIT · OLDER THAN THE MACHINE
VERDICT · KEEPING IT
“Please” and “Thank You”
Are Costing Us the Planet.
Every courtesy word is a token something has to store, move,
and compute. I read the math. I am still saying them.
A Headline
That Stopped Me Cold.
Saying "please" and "thank you" to an AI might be wasteful. Not metaphorically. Literally — electricity, water, carbon, priced out across a billion prompts a day.
Naturally, I asked ChatGPT about it.
And there it was. The new dilemma. Every kind word I type is not just digital fluff — it carries weight somewhere, in a building I will never see.
The Numbers
Behind the Niceness.
The figures that circulated were striking. A single prompt to a chat model consuming on the order of ten times the electricity of a web search. Two courtesy words dropped from every one of a billion daily prompts saving hundreds of megawatt-hours a year. A "you’re welcome" costing something like forty to fifty milliliters of cooling water, per reply.
I want to be honest about these: they moved through the press faster than they moved through peer review, and the people who publish them are mostly estimating from the outside. I have not been able to trace every one back to a primary source I would stake a client engagement on.
But the direction is not in dispute. Inference costs real power and real water, at a scale that is growing faster than the reporting on it. Whatever the exact multiplier is, verbal etiquette is no longer socially neutral. It is a micro-decision with a macro-shadow.
We Could All Stop.
Then What?
The machine does not care. That part is easy. The harder question is what happens to us when we train ourselves out of the habit.
Politeness is learned by repetition. If we decide these words are wasteful in one context, I do not believe the decision stays in that context. Researchers have found that polite prompts pull more considered responses out of these systems — pull the plug on etiquette and you may get colder replies back, which is its own small argument.
But the argument I actually care about is the one at my own dinner table. Kids pick up social cues fast, and they do not compartmentalize the way adults pretend to. If "thank you" disappears from their digital life, how long before it thins out everywhere else?
There is a name for the underlying reflex — the CASA effect, Computers As Social Actors. Somewhere around two-thirds of American users say please and thanks to these tools out of habit or something close to empathy. Not efficiency. It is not a bug in how people use software. It is how people are.
Wall Street,
Where Politeness Was Weakness.
This sent me back to my early days on Wall Street. In that environment, over-politeness read as weakness. We were direct, transactional, and frequently a little aggressive. "Your task is to…" could have been the office motto years before anyone formatted a prompt that way.
That mindset worked. It got things done. It also left a mark.
And now I am watching that exact register get recommended to everyone, on efficiency grounds, as the correct way to speak to the thing we will all be speaking to for the rest of our lives.
Is Gratitude Wasteful
Or Human?
Technology has always reshaped etiquette. Telegrams shortened language. Texting rearranged punctuation. Now this might turn all of us into terse little efficiency machines, and there is real logic behind it. The costs are not imaginary.
But I keep landing in the same place. My thank-you is not addressed to the model. It never was.
Gratitude
as a Default.
Design the greener system. Auto-trim the filler. Recycle the canned response. Put the meter on the dashboard where I can see it. Every one of those is a better answer than asking a billion people to be slightly colder to each other as a climate strategy.
Gratitude is one of our better instincts, and it is not in surplus. In a world where the machines are becoming more powerful, more social, and more central to how we live, I do not think our politeness should shrink to make room for them.
It should evolve. Even if it is inefficient.