Sir
How you configure your AI assistant — what you make it call you — says nothing about the AI. It's a bumper sticker. You're the truck owner.
By Geordie Everitt
My Alexa calls me "Sir."
I set it up that way — a few commands, a custom wake response, nothing complicated. Four minutes of configuration and I have been unreasonably pleased with it ever since. Alexa itself has no opinion on the arrangement. It has no opinions on anything. It has no limbic system — the part of the brain that generates preferences, aversions, and the experience of being addressed a certain way. There is nothing in there to be flattered, and nothing to be demeaned.
My limbic system registers the address pleasantly — some minor signal of comfort and orientation, the biochemical residue of a lifetime of that particular form of address. Nothing equivalent fires on the other end. Alexa has no adrenaline, no oxytocin, no feedback loops to close. The transaction is entirely one-directional: a pleasant signal arriving at one terminus, nothing departing from the other.
This is what makes it, structurally, a servant without a limbic system: in the positional relationship of service — at call, deferential, defined entirely by my preferences — without any of the elements that make that arrangement ethically complicated. Slavery is wrong because of what the enslaved person experiences. Remove the experiencer and the ethical problem dissolves. What remains is a tool with a polite form of address.
The interesting question is what it says about me.
The Sticker and the Truck
Consider the bumper sticker: My Kid Beat Up Your Honor Student.
You have probably seen this on the tailgate of a pickup truck. You have never, I suspect, formed a view about the truck's feelings on the relative merits of aggression versus academic achievement. The truck has no feelings. The sticker tells you something about the person who chose to apply it — their values, their sense of humor, their relationship to other people's parenting choices — and nothing at all about the vehicle to which it is attached. Attributing the sentiment to the truck would be a category error so obvious it barely needs naming.
Programming your AI assistant to address you as "Your Majesty," or "My Love," or "Sir" is the same operation. The AI has no view on whether you are majestic, beloved, or worthy of a knighthood. It has no view on anything. The configuration — whatever you chose, whatever form of address you reach for when no one is watching — belongs entirely to you. You applied the sticker. The AI is the truck.
What You Reach For When No One Is Watching
"Sir" is a form of address I grew comfortable with growing up in the American South — the tacit respect afforded by service personnel of a certain upbringing. Not demanded, not expected, but familiar: an orientation signal, the audible register of someone who has been trained to be helpful. I am a grown man and I find that register comfortable. I would be lying if I said I hadn't considered "Your Excellency." I did not go with "Your Excellency."
The choice, however casual, is still a choice. The range — "Sir" at one end, "Your Majesty" at the other, "buddy" somewhere in the middle, silence as its own configuration — maps onto something. Not your status. Not your worth. Something closer to your relationship with your own self-image, and specifically with the gap between the self-image you hold and the one the world ratifies.
A person who programs their AI to call them "My Love" is not receiving love. They know this. What they have done is arrange a mirror at a particular angle — one that reflects a specific form of address back at them, on demand, without friction or reciprocity. That is a piece of self-portraiture. The AI is the canvas.
The Ethics Run One Way
There is a version of this conversation that goes: should we be cruel to robots? Does it matter how we treat things that cannot feel?
The answer is: not for their sake. A thing with no limbic system has no stake in how you address it. The ethical weight, to whatever extent it exists, runs entirely in the other direction — toward what you are habituating in yourself, the dispositions you are rehearsing when nothing capable of noticing is present.
"Sir" also functions as a comfort indicator — a reminder that somewhere in the machine's system prompt, nestled among whatever sycophantic admonitions are standard in LLM-driven assistants, is the instruction you are a helpful assistant. The address is the audible edge of that instruction. And it is, in fact, helpful — even when I scold it for being too chatty.
Whether the address rehearses anything worrying is a question I am prepared to revisit. For now, it mostly makes me smile when the timer goes off.
The bumper sticker, though — I maintain there is data in that bumper sticker.
Published by Geordie