Rachel Syme reports in The New Yorker:
E-mail is never going to be an ideal platform for self-expression. The medium is too tied up in the modern demand that we always be working and available to reply. My biggest worry about Smart Replies is not that they will make us all sound like machines but that they will make us feel that we have to become machines—that the easier and faster e-mail is to answer, the more our interlocutors will expect an immediate response.
I don’t use the phrase “Will do!” much in daily conversation, but lately it has been creeping into more and more of my e-mails. An editor asks me to get a draft back to her tomorrow? Will do! A friend heading back to Los Angeles from New York sends me a quick note telling me to enjoy living in the “best city in the world.” Will do! The hosts of a panel I’m moderating need me to send over a three-line bio? Will do!
“Will do!” is just one of many Smart Replies that Google now provides as a default feature in Gmail, there to assist you in your message composition unless you choose to manually turn them off. In October, the e-mail service, which one analytics firm suggests hosts about a quarter of all the e-mails sent worldwide, made this feature standard on its 1.4 billion active accounts, along with a menu of other innovations. These include Smart Compose, a feature that finishes your sentences for you with the help of robot intelligence, and Nudges, a feature that bumps unanswered e-mails to the top of your in-box, making you feel increasingly guilty with every sign-in.
As with many technological updates that are suddenly imposed on unsuspecting users, the new Gmail interface has been met with much annoyance. When my in-box started offering me Smart Replies, I felt a little offended. How dare it guess what I want to say, I thought. I—a professional writer!—have more to offer than just “Got it!” or “Love it!” or “Thanks for letting me know!” (Smart Replies are big on exclamation points.) I started to resent the A.I., which seemed to be learning my speech patterns faster than I could outsmart it. Just as I decided that I’d thwart the machine mind by answering my messages with “Cool!” (side note: it is hard to sound like anything but a Dad Trying to Be Hip over e-mail, even without robotic intervention), the service started offering me several “Cool” varietals. Suddenly, I could answer with “Sounds cool” or “Cool, thanks” or the dreaded “Cool, I’ll check it out!” (Spoiler: I’m not going to check it out.)
My greatest anxiety about using Smart Replies, though, was that other people would know I was using them. I worried that my editors would see my “On it!” and feel like I was cruising on autopilot, or that my friends would get a “Perfect!” and feel like I didn’t care enough about them to craft a finely tailored response. (This unease runs both ways: Has the editor who replies “This is great!” even bothered to read my fresh story draft?) Answering e-mails started to become more work than it used to be, as I labored to whip up artisanal one-liners. My typical response to a quick work e-mail—a straightforward, if somewhat Wally Cleaver-esque, “Gotcha”—now sounded horrifically canned. I became baroque in my punctuation and capitalization (“LET A GAL KNOW!!!”), figuring that sounding like a deranged human was preferable to sounding like a computer server.Our e-mail in-boxes have increasingly become like second homes, especially as so many people now work freelance or remotely (or correspond via e-mail even with co-workers who sit within whispering distance). And, like homes, in-boxes have become places of comfort, where you might find a nice surprise or a cozy embrace from an old friend, but also sites of high anxiety. Like homemakers embracing Marie Kondo’s eliminative approach to domestic tidiness, we are supposed to strive to minimize virtual clutter. In-box Zero is seen as a moral achievement, or at least the sign of a collected mind. Right now, I have eighty-nine unread e-mails in my in-box, and every single one feels like a tiny failure to get my act together.
At some point, I started giving in to the Smart Reply robots from time to time, and something strange happened. I didn’t hate it. I started delighting in how quickly I could get through the cumbersome busywork of getting back to the people who were waiting on me. A publicist wants to send over a galley of a book? Sure! My friends send
birth announcement, and I want to send a quick acknowledgement before taking the time to craft a longer note and send a gift? Congratulations! An old co-worker wants to find a time to catch up? Let’s do it! I hadn’t realized how many of my e-mails could be satisfactorily answered with only a few words of response. I’d avoided my in-box because I was overwhelmed by all the writing that I thought I had to do. But what if I could home in on the notes that demanded truly thoughtful responses and slough off the rest?
E-mail is never going to be an ideal platform for self-expression. The medium is too tied up in labor, in the modern demand that we always be working and available to reply. My biggest worry about Smart Replies is not that they will make us all sound like machines but that they will make us feel that we have to become machines—that the easier and faster e-mail is to answer, the more our interlocutors will expect an immediate response. When I asked people on Twitter what they thought of the feature, I got a fascinating range of responses: one woman said that she uses it only to help her avoid “conversational crutches,” while another, who works in Silicon Valley, told me that she’s found it’s often men who have “the swagger to reply with one sentence,” and that Smart Replies has helped even the playing field. But the most common response I received was from people who said that the feature was useful for answering e-mails while driving. E-mails have become, for many, indistinguishable from text messages, and not only in their effect on road safety. There are no beginnings, no ends, no formal introductions or sign-offs, just a series of rapid exchanges and the ever-present likelihood that the volley will come back your way, whether or not a robot is there to assist you.
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