I Used Gmail Auto-Complete, and Now I Know I’m Worthless
The feature’s predictive powers make me feel … predictable, robotic, and un-singular
A specter is haunting Gmail — the specter of a completed sentence. My fingers tap out the beginning of a message, and a gray phantom appears, with eerie anticipation.
“Thanks for taking [a look!]”
“Tuesday’s no [good, sorry.]”
“Can’t tom[orrow but what about next week?]”
The spectral presence is a technology called Smart Compose. If you’ve used Gmail even once in the past few months, you’ve almost certainly noticed the function, even if you didn’t use it or know its name. Smart Compose is the more advanced kin of another new Gmail technology, called Smart Reply. That’s the name for the boxes that may appear under a new message suggesting a rote reply, such as “Thanks so much!” or “Yes and yes!”
Some technology works, so people like it; and some technology doesn’t work, so people hate it. Google’s Smart Compose belongs to a different category: tech that people hate because it works. Smart Compose has an uncanny ability to auto-complete replies with my exact phraseology — to do precisely the thing for which it is designed — and it is for this very reason that I (and, I’ve gathered…
