![]() The major stumbling block to my ever having used smart replies before was tone. My week was merely a never-ending spree of palatable options that were terrifyingly bland. This, I feared, could be my fate glibly responding to emails announcing the death of a family friend with blandly inappropriate corporate speak like “Outstanding!” or “Can we change this to Friday?” It turned out I shouldn’t have worried, as the replies were almost universally, even unnervingly, appropriate to the topic. You know the scene: he’s doing great for a while, but eventually comes a cropper when his Bergerac is hit in the crotch by a wheelie bin, or a nest of wasps, which causes our hero to repeat his every swear word verbatim. I worried I’d be forced to make wildly inappropriate remarks to longstanding friends and colleagues, like the hapless idiot in an American sitcom, receiving ear-piece instructions to get him through a date with the hottest girl in school. Starting off, I had thought the main issue would be accuracy. Opting for “OK, thanks!” I began my smart reply odyssey and a descent into what quickly became the world’s most boring Choose Your Own Adventure game. Below it lay three unassuming rectangles poised for my selection: Opening my inbox I found an email from my wife telling me she had booked a restaurant and hoped I thought it would be as great as she did. More importantly, they seemed written in a tone that I have never used in my entire life, one of indeterminate, cheery abandon that would surely present as false were I to ever use it myself.īut God has his reasons and I endeavoured to discern them for myself. My memory of seeing, and ignoring, the little options below my emails was that they seemed generally accurate, but also glib and oddly worded. Odder still, it feels this way despite the fact I had never used it before. It’s odd that Gmail smart replies have only been around since 2017, since they’re the kind of subtly ever-present tool that now seems always to have been there. But how well does it really know us? How deeply does its unsleeping, lidless eye scan our thoughts and deeds? And could I use this information, the knowledge of a god, to create a stronger, better, smarter me? Seeking answers, I stopped resisting and spent an entire week surrendering to its every whim. Not only can it see what you’ve already read and written, it has some great ideas on how to make your next contribution, too. Nowhere is this truer than with Gmail smart replies, the pocket panopticon that now resides in every inbox. The genius of today’s boring dystopia has been to offer this surveillance as a feature, not a bug to cast that all-seeing-eye not as a malevolent shadowy jailer, but as the world’s most boring personal assistant. No true version of the prison was ever really built, and the word itself only now lives on due to its prodigious utility within breathless op-eds about surveillance culture, mostly written by people who’ve already overused references to Orwell and Kafka. This would, his theory went, encourage prisoners to presume they were always being watched, and thus act accordingly. T he philosopher Jeremy Bentham was famed for his panopticon, a hypothetical circular prison that was designed in such a way that its inmates never knew whether or not they were being observed.
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