I love tech, but it's kind of scary, I think we are heading towards a dystopian future.
Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
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Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#42Good 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.
I despise the homogenization of thought that these tools lead to. My words are my own, even my typos.
I don't think there's any basis for the argument that autocomplete tools lead to "homogenization of thought", and therefore no reason to "despise" them.
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#43So why exactly are people suddenly up in arms about this? How's it different from opening up your android phone and using google's spellcheck, with algorithms that predict your next word when you're typing? Never seen such atrociously negative comments to what's essentially a cool feature you can disable. PS: How many of the outraged people here are actually voting with their wallet and paying for something like Fast…
Two big problems.
One, AI mediation of language sees issues like bias amplification (AI learns our biases then suggests them back to us). Google itself wrote about this recently [1].
Two, spell check has a homogenizing effect on spelling [2]. If you extend this to the level of phrases, that will homogenize not just spelling but the very way we talk.
[1] https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/04/text-embedding-mod...
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#44This is very neat technologically. I can't imagine it is easy to do predictive text and have it be meaningful. I suspect that that will be the case here. It will be useful for a narrow subset, mostly rote business things. Otherwise, it will just be an annoyance.
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#45So why exactly are people suddenly up in arms about this? How's it different from opening up your android phone and using google's spellcheck, with algorithms that predict your next word when you're typing? Never seen such atrociously negative comments to what's essentially a cool feature you can disable. PS: How many of the outraged people here are actually voting with their wallet and paying for something like Fast…
I pay for FastMail. Voted with my wallet two years ago.
If I get any impression someone is writing me messages with this feature, I'll filter them into my trash. I want to speak to people, not Google.
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#46So why exactly are people suddenly up in arms about this? How's it different from opening up your android phone and using google's spellcheck, with algorithms that predict your next word when you're typing? Never seen such atrociously negative comments to what's essentially a cool feature you can disable. PS: How many of the outraged people here are actually voting with their wallet and paying for something like Fast…
At this point the only reason I haven't ditched Gmail is because that's the email address I've used everywhere. Changing email addresses is even more problematic than changing physical addresses these days.
The reason people are so upset is that it has a negative effect on the world even if people have the option to turn it off (and don't), and it has virtually no real benefit. It's the latest in the trend of tech companies trying to solve problems that don't exist, and creating new ones in the process.
At best, you'll never know if the person on the other end of the line outsourced their response to Google. At worst, people's mental capacity for expression and nuance will start to atrophy because they couldn't be bothered to manually relate to another human being.
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#47This is awful. We need _less_ mediation and commodification of our personal interactions, not more. What is the use of this? At best this is a solution searching for a problem, at worst it's an attempt to standardize our communication in a way which makes semantic meaning easier to analyse.
Agreed. Rather than something customers asked for, this feels like something driven by the culture at Google: "AI all the things" and "build new things" to get promoted.
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#48These types of tools worry me, because I put a lot of value in organic spontaneous conversation.
Does anyone remember the old days of Google search maybe 10-15 years ago? You would put in a search query, and often you would find something interesting in a serendipitous manner.
These days the machine tries to figure out what you like, and what makes them the most money / is most popular and keeps feeding you that and nothing else.
You get trapped in a filter bubble, and nothing ever seems to change in your searches. The same sites, the same quality of content (often low), the same authors.
What ever happened to running into the blog of someone who is totally unknown, but put a lot of effort into researching and creating an amazing and informational blog post? Quality well above average, maybe it was their only post. One topic they spent years researching and distilling for the world to see.
This is what you will lose in your conversations, just like it has been lost in search.
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#49Good 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.
If it wrote the entire email for you, and you watched it to see there were no mistakes, I suppose that would just be a convenience too. But at some point you cross a line and your voice is lost. That line draws closer, inch by inch.
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#50I don’t understand the sentiment of the comments here (I’m no google fan!). Isn’t that just the natural evolution of word prediction like on a smartphone?
Yes. But let's extend that evolution -- if an AI can pretty much write a solid email, don't we basically become like a safety driver in a self-driving car? Not alluring.
It's an interesting analogy, since this tool could potentially keep you safe from making costly errors. And, as an email-composing safety driver, you can always take the wheel when you need (or want) to.