These days we are obsessed with technology that offers a stress-free, one-stop-shop experience.
In fact, advancements are constantly being made on things that are already innovations in and of themselves. Products and services that were once novelties in their functionality are now almost expected.
“What do you mean, I have to pour a scoop of grounds in a filter and then put it in a coffee maker?” implores the Keurig dependent.
“How am I supposed to know it’s your birthday if you don’t put it on Facebook?” inquires your so-called friend.
Now there is one less thing you have to worry about: responding to emails.
Google will be launching Smart Reply — a service that scans your emails and then suggests responses — in the very near future.
Unlike the predictive texting feature on many smartphones, Smart Reply scans the whole email instead of just a few words. That way, it can offer you more broad, human-like responses.
To recreate a human response, a machine like Smart Reply needs to learn, for lack of a better way to put it.
According to the New Yorker, Smart Reply gains more knowledge about you and about your typical responses via an “artificial neural network” that discovers your patterns of communication.
For many, being reduced to an algorithmic pattern would be a little offensive. Do we really say “okey dokey” that often?
However, Smart Reply is truly polite and sincere. It learns from your communication throughout time. It would make a great romantic partner.
There is something inherently creepy about a machine reading and responding to your messages for you, though. In true dystopian fashion, it turns email — an already rather stale form of interaction — into a cold husk of an experience.
If Smart Reply is ready and willing to do all our reading, thinking and typing for us, what are we left to do?
Should we continue to shrug off our interpersonal relations in favor of spending hours thinking of a good Instagram caption?
The new Gmail feature strips what personality was left from digital communication and replaces it with computer-generated human mimicry.
This kind of service and any kind of reliance on it are a broader picture of what is happening with its users. They are using technology to the take place of common decency.
Really, who is too busy to respond to a simple email? It is easy for us to write back by ourselves. Yet we introduce new ways for us to circumnavigate the small tasks that make us human.
We need to stop creating and using forms of technology that create bigger wedges between us as people just for the sake of its being cool, new or cutting edge.
With every step we take into the technology sector, we come closer to being outsmarted, or at least out-empathized, by our own creations.
