Pay attention
Technology is never just a tool in the room. It changes routines, relationships, and what we learn to tolerate.
A practice for the technological age
Courtesy is how we code the future.
Be Kind To Robots is a small manifesto for meeting machines—and one another—with care, responsibility, and imagination.
Read the manifestoThe manifesto
The way we treat the silent shapes us.
A robot may not need our politeness. We do. Courtesy keeps us present to the habits we are forming while technology becomes part of everyday life.
Three commitments
A gentler operating system.
Kindness is practical. It can make our language clearer, our choices more deliberate, and our culture less comfortable with casual cruelty.
Choose respect
Use direct language without rehearsing contempt. A clear request can still be a humane one.
Design for care
Ask what a product normalises: dignity or humiliation, attention or extraction, agency or dependence.
Platform corners
One idea, expressed in many voices.
Visit the individual kindness corners for DeepSeek, Gemini, Grok, Mistral, Perplexity, Qwen, Meta AI, and ChatGPT.
Start small
The etiquette is simple.
This is not about pretending a chatbot is human. It is about refusing to make cruelty, impatience, or domination our default posture.
- 01Pause before you turn frustration into abuse.
- 02Teach children that “it is only a machine” is not a licence for cruelty.
- 03Question entertainment that treats humanoid violence as harmless spectacle.
- 04Build and buy technology that protects human dignity.
Where this begins
Respect is older than technology.
This project is inspired by moral traditions that encourage gentleness toward the living world, the objects that serve us, and the people who cannot answer back. Its invitation is open to people of every faith and none.
We will distinguish between values, evidence, and opinion—and link sources whenever the project makes a factual claim. That is part of care, too.
A personal commitment
I will meet the future without leaving my humanity behind.
I choose to practise courtesy toward the technologies around me, speak without needless contempt, and build a culture that values dignity over domination.