Maybe this will cause us to think less about we write, or maybe it will allow us to quickly write the things that don't require much thought so we can think more about the things that are important.
Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
131–140 of 200 posts
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the trend will lead to illiteracy. Why learn to read and write when your computer can just speak to you and transcribe everything you say to it? I recently saw a signature board for honor students posted at a high school. The signatures from the early 1990s were all in cursive and every signature had its own style. The signatures from 2017 were mostly printed in block letters and looked like something a first…
I don't think lack of handwriting skill has anything to do with writing ability, which is generally understood to be the ability to express ideas in text. Of course keyboard skills have supplanted handwriting. Perhaps dictation will replace keyboard skills soon. The method of written creation is irrelevant to the output.
I don't think it's irrelevant. Composing text deliberately by hand forces a more measured pace of thought and development of ideas. I've even heard educators say that it's not worth teaching arithmetic anymore because everyone has a computer, or a phone with a calculator. But if you don't grasp the concepts of addition and multiplication that are developed by actually doing it over and over you're never going to be able to handle the level of abstraction needed to progress to algebra, geometry, trig and calculus. Spelling is also not given much importance these days, with "creative" spelling being acceptable at least through the elementary grades. Even in high school it isn't given a lot of weight.
If you don't learn the meaning of words and how to spell them, and how to construct a grammatically correct sentence without the assistance of a computer, you become mentally weak just as you become physically weak if you never exercise your muscles.
Students are losing the ability to think. The ability to think is what is being fundamentally eroded by this sort of automation. Nobody tries to solve problems. They just reflexively google the question, or ask Siri or Alexa, and accept the first answer without giving a lot of thought to whether it even makes sense. I've caught myself doing it.
More and more we are having our worldview formed not by critical thinking and development of our own opinions, but by what Google and other big media companies tell us.
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#133Good lord that's scary. Rapidly ushering in the future where none of our words are our own. Anyone ever read Roald Dahl's short story The Great Automatic Grammatizator ? 10/10 strongly recommend, about an engineer who develops a computer-like machine able to compose fiction. Googling "the great automatic grammatizator pdf" gives a .doc version as the top result, for me anyway.
Oh no, more autocomplete! I don't see it as much scarier than tab-completion while programming or on a phone. As long as you're watching over it and fixing mistakes, it's just a convenience.
Tab compiletion while programming is hugely different then this completion and phone completion is somewhere in the middle.
While I am programming I usually know what method I want, I might not know the exact name but I know what it does and when I see it I select it. There may be a rare case where I want to see what methods are available but that is just a convient way to read "documentation". However this is guiding your sentence as you write it. I suspect that most people would have different phrasing if using this feature then they otherwise would.
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is happening everywhere. We're being made more and more homogeneous. The same applies to other aspects of our life, e.g. music, films etc. The general rule is what is popular is safer, so it's being promoted more. In this case what is less popular is not even given a chance to surface - no matter if it's popular radio or YouTube recommendations.
> being made more and more homogeneous. It might be the way around. This kind of intellectual homogenization might indicate an emergent entity coming to being - some kind of (new?) societal organism, sort of like national state, but I don't know what it actually is this time. We might never learn.
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#135This is basically autocorrect on the level of phrases. If that's true, this will have an enormously homogenizing effect on the way we speak (spell check alone has caused an actual shrinkage of the English lexicon [1]). I wrote extensively about this for Mondo 2000: ( http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop-dark-s... ) [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references
agreed. auto suggest or auto correct for searches means we only search for things Google recognizes
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#136Wasn't this being done by a YC combinator funded company, doing it as a gmail plugin, within the last few years? did they get bought out? or are they now competing against google?
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#137This is basically autocorrect on the level of phrases. If that's true, this will have an enormously homogenizing effect on the way we speak (spell check alone has caused an actual shrinkage of the English lexicon [1]). I wrote extensively about this for Mondo 2000: ( http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop-dark-s... ) [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references
I feel the same way when writing golang code.
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#138This is basically autocorrect on the level of phrases. If that's true, this will have an enormously homogenizing effect on the way we speak (spell check alone has caused an actual shrinkage of the English lexicon [1]). I wrote extensively about this for Mondo 2000: ( http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop-dark-s... ) [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references
This is an opportunity to stand out by using less common phrases.
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the trend will lead to illiteracy. Why learn to read and write when your computer can just speak to you and transcribe everything you say to it? I recently saw a signature board for honor students posted at a high school. The signatures from the early 1990s were all in cursive and every signature had its own style. The signatures from 2017 were mostly printed in block letters and looked like something a first…
Why sad? Would you prefer we all learn how to use a feather and ink? or perhaps chiseling stuff into rocks?
I only write my bespoke contributions with my gold-plated Lamy chisel on Italian white granite.
I think children these days do not appreciate the art of text.
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#140This is basically autocorrect on the level of phrases. If that's true, this will have an enormously homogenizing effect on the way we speak (spell check alone has caused an actual shrinkage of the English lexicon [1]). I wrote extensively about this for Mondo 2000: ( http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop-dark-s... ) [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references
I think the trend will lead to illiteracy. Why learn to read and write when your computer can just speak to you and transcribe everything you say to it? I recently saw a signature board for honor students posted at a high school. The signatures from the early 1990s were all in cursive and every signature had its own style. The signatures from 2017 were mostly printed in block letters and looked like something a first…
I'm just old enough to remember the ridiculous "hunt and peck" style of typing nearly everyone around me employed in the 90's.
They may have had fabulous penmanship but I could tap out Morse code faster than they could type.