Almost everything that technology touched has been 'dehumanized' in some way or the other. It was initially email. How can I take something seriously if its sent as an email, and when the sender has virutally zero cost in doing so. Overtime, we've come to accept that as a norm
I'd reckon smart replies would follow a similar path. Might look odd, but would become natural in a few years.
>> ...Smart Replies seems like an unnecessarily lazy way to have a conversation.
Text messaging is a lazy way to have a conversation; this is a perfect fit. If you want to have a real conversation, call me, or meet me for lunch. Or do the former to arrange the latter (novel!).
But that is exactly the point. It is inconvenient, so when you choose to do it, it implies you care more about that conversation.
It doesn't mean e-mail isn't perfectly fine for a lot of conversation, but you should expect people to treat it accordingly: You care enough to write an e-mail instead of an IM, but not enough to call them or a arrange a face to face.
Sometimes it's perfectly appropriate to convey that. Sometimes it's not.
How would the recipient know whether I've used the "Yum clams!" smart reply or typed in the same thing myself? If you can't tell then how is the author of the article going to act on his self-righteous anger about what his friends choose to do with their time?
I'm gonna copyright my smart replies so you can't use them! I don't want anyone to sound like me because people are going to realize I am just smart replying.
That's exactly my feelings too. If the author gets outraged about the possibility of using autosuggested responses instead of typing them in manually, I suggest that the author has some issues.
In Inbox, I've found that emailing a screenshot of the smart reply I've chosen, instead of clicking it, is the first sarcastic way to use it. It takes longer, doesn't improve future suggestions, and makes explicitly clear I'm not replying creatively.
The author didn't exactly spell it out, but I found the suggestions to be so adequate that they become what i want to say. They become limiting in a sense.
The simulated conversation image is a great example. After seeing those responses, the response 'aww so cute' or 'Love the daisy' are about about the same or better than what I can or would care to think of in a text conversation. Is there really a better way to think answer that and why should I waste the time to do so?
I think that's the point of the article: using "smart replies" makes it seem like you're so disinterested in your conversation partner that you consider coming up with your own responses a waste of time.
It is, and honestly - I find expecting from the other side to be always fully committed to you in a conversation to be a sign of disrespect. I guess some people want to feel more important to others that they really are.
It also depends on the discussion. Whenever someone talks to me about something requiring my personal attention, I pay that attention. But most conversations with people are trivial, and expecting someone to drop everything they were concentrating on and pay full attention to your trivial question is, again, a sign of disrespect.
> The author didn't exactly spell it out, but I found the suggestions to be so adequate that they become what i want to say. They become limiting in a sense.
This effect is the only one thing that worries me with those replies. It won't be good if people start to choose only from suggestions instead of choosing them only when they are appropriate. And, as you observed, the effect can be subtle.
But the very idea of a computer typing up the response for you? I don't mind that at all - that's what computers are for, to let you do more with less effort.
I like smart replies. They are not quite the exact words I would normally use, but they're close, so I kind of enjoy selecting them as a sort of novelty. In that sense, it's kind of like spellcheck (which tells me I just misspelled spellcheck). If I was replying to those texts, it would have gone something like that:
> What are you up to?
>> Work.
or
> Want to hang out?
>> Sure.
The suggestions Google provides are a little bit more upbeat and amusing to me.
> What are you up to?
>> I am working!
or
> Want to hang out?
>> I'd love to.
I especially like how it inverts how I'd normally use exclamation marks and periods. "I'm working." "I'd love to!" etc.
Anyway, neat feature. The author doesn't like it, I do, so she can not use the feature and I can use it :P
I'm not really bothered by the distinction. When you repeat someone's words, you're taking on the responsibility of having used them, so to me, the meaning is the same whether you press letter-shaped screen widgets or press word-shaped screen widgets.
I don't think anyone is going to think "I'm not really sure if I love my partner, but Google says I do, so I guess I do." I also don't think people are using mobile apps to have the deep types of conversations where this would matter.
Like I said, I see it as a more interesting spellcheck. I usually say things like "yup", Google offers more amusing suggestions that I enjoy.
Perhaps its the smartarse Australian larrikin in me, but these kinds of automated responses depress me, because I can see them working like corporate new-speak: they're going to push us to limit our communication down to a bunch of canned responses, emotions and interactions.
Sometimes I think AI isn't advancing at all, its just that we're all working more and more to fall in line like good automatons...
I love sarcasm, dead-pan, violently black-humour...and I'm watching it all slowly disappear and we all become pidgeonholed, public, on-show, quantised and sanitised.
I'd much rather bring back:
>What are you up to?
>> In middle of school shooting. Cops on way. Call you back in 5?
>Want to hang out?
>> I'm in the bathroom, so in a way, I already am...
> sends through that picture of child holding flower
>> Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he's got... lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah...
> >What are you up to? >> In middle of school shooting. Cops on way. Call you back in 5?
These days, that sounds like something that would make SWAT invite themselves into your house, through a window.
The responses are sure cute and creative. I seriously doubt whoever writes like this today will change their ways because of "smart replies". Most people don't write stuff like that, definitely not during most of the conversations.
I don't really have a formed view yet. I think getting outraged over someone using augmented software to respond faster is wrong, and only a problem with the person who gets outraged. On the other hand I do appreciate the effect of limiting the potential conversation space if people get too dependent those reply suggestions.
It is also true though that a lot of conversations one has over e-mail or IMs follow so common patterns that there were many times I wished I could just automate it away, to have a bot reply to them without the other side knowing. Maybe I'm just antisocial? But I tend to differentiate between requests for information from requests for personal attention, and wouldn't mind having my bot handle all of the former.
(Then again, I wouldn't accept anything except a bot I wrote myself, so maybe I'm not that antisocial - since I'd be just spawning a part of myself as an external process. That's also one reason why I'm so pissed about all the modern bot / AI tech from Google, et al., which has zero configurability, zero ways to plug your own stuff in yourself.)
If you dislike talking to someone so much that you wish you could automate it away, why are you talking to them to begin with?
This seems similar or related to the need people seem to have to remain permanently connected even to people who they only met for a few seconds at a bar once, to increase that ever-important "friend count". Some relationships are meant to end. It's not healthy to try to maintain 1000 vaguely familiar people as "friends".
The ridiculous thing is, most of those "friends" are dreading having to pretend to care about the things you, the guy they met for a few seconds once but feel bad deleting, post on the internet as well. Just stop it. Neither side wins in forced out-of-sympathy/fear/loyalty/obligation/etc relationships.
Because my mother (and lots of other people I care about) don't understand how draining it can be for someone like me to carry on a conversation sometimes. Maybe having a high friend count is something you feel the need to deal with, but for others of us software like this might actually solve a problem. Please reserve your judgement on our social protocols for... Nobody.
(Disclaimer: I don't use allo so I don't know what it's capable of. I kind of doubt it's there yet. )
Your examples are exactly the reason why I do not like Smart Replies: it says a lot about a person what he/she is writing. The choice in words (or lack of) is very important. Typing already misses a lot of non-verbal information. That's how we got smiley icons. Smart Replies makes the replies even less informing.
Conversions will become more predictable and shallow then they already are.
In a perfect world using the word "smart" in this context would be a clever use of irony instead of another disheartening example of the vapidity of modern society.
About 8 years ago I was jokingly going to write this for guys who were too dumb or lazy or to much of a 20 something to auto write back to girls they met out. My girlfriend, future wife was horrified by the idea. The waitresses at the bar were like "Meh... at least he though enough to enter me into the system and he'll remember to talk to me." My wife threatened bloody murder on me as she couldn't trust that I wasn't using it on her... and now google wants to do it on a facebook level, eg society wide. Well this will be worth a good laugh and cry with my wife.
Yeah that's was mostly my reaction to my wife's reaction. My thought was it would help people get over the awkward part. This seems like it'd be more endemic to all communications.
Then again I remember seeing on the palm pre a feature that showed you notes about the caller on the call screen. Supposed to be for sales people to put stuff like "Wife Jane, 3 kids, Bobby, Sue, Jamal" to read before they picked up.
> Then again I remember seeing on the palm pre a feature that showed you notes about the caller on the call screen.
Is there anything wrong with that? Seems very useful.
(How do people think how previous generations handled having many acquaintances and still knowing something personal about each of them? They noted things down, on paper.)
It seems fine in the small but immediately imagined sales guy in a smarmy voice saying how's Betty and the kids. That said I thought it was a great idea. Heck at the time I was working with about 80 people from a customer and having it say jake (junior java dev... insurance ingestion...mega insurance inc) would have been great. Oh well my cynical snarky self is conflicted now.
I have had exactly the same idea before when I was trying to get with a bunch of girls. There is this whole "initial" part, where you just talk about garbage. It is so time-consuming and it is all a numbers game. If you could automate it, you could reel in lots of girls with no work.
I have a friend who did this with meet and craigslist. He just sent a message to every single posting of "Hey". If the person responded then he would actually look at the profile and see if he wanted to send another. He automated it to where he just could click a yes or no link and it would send "want to meet?" This is essentially tinder I guess as people are generally active currently on tinder and just looking to go out.
Anyway he would go on dates about 3-5 times a week with new people. He also ran into a lot of crazy.
He's always been more of a surface level relationship person. We were talking about this last night and he's just coming to grips with having a real relationship that has settled and become comfortable as opposed to awkward. He's somewhat at a loss. I'm telling him that now is when he can really have fun. But that part is anecdoteal I guess.
I like the smart replies. And my girlfriend loves it too. The replies look to be relevant and optional. So when you don't have time to type out a proper response, use the suggestion. Otherwise who's stopping you from typing out by hand?
>Further, I don't care how intelligent these Smart Replies are: They can never capture the personality and character of a real human conversation.
Really? Tell that to the people living in the time before Alphago made it's 37th move and astounded Lee Sedol himself. AI is here, it is as smart or smarter in some areas. The number of such areas is going to grow. Get used to it.
Please find a way to get that idea in front of Charlie Brooker. It could make for a pretty good Black Mirror episode.
(And while we are on the subject.. There was a blog post back in 2005 about the inverse situation: if the person behind the other screen has the preconception that you are a bot, convincing them of your humanity is nearly impossible. The post now lives as a PDF document.[0])
As the author already points out, this is the main purpose of smart replies:
> I can understand canned responses like "Be right there!" or "I'll be late!" if you're in a car and only have a few seconds to reply before you have to get back to the business of driving.
I typically only use them when I'm busy and I see a message and respond to it from my watch.
Why even use keyboards? They're just a lazy, creativity-free version of writing by hand. We should be having this discussion by sending each other postcards, with REAL doodled faces, every one of them unique, none of this ASCII ":)" nonsense :P
Should we now have an existential crisis when the smart reply is exactly what we were going to say? Should we type it anyway just to teach the machine it was right?
Should we save our outrage for something more then a feature in an announced chat app?
I registered this account just to say that you just gave me a little bit of hope that I'm not the only human alive who hasn't completely lost my mind. Thank you. Really.
I'm sure this will be downvoted (edit: maybe I was wrong, which makes me feel better yet) because it doesn't really add anything to the discussion, but I've been increasingly depressed about this stuff lately, and hearing/seeing someone else basically put the words in my brain down here, helped a lot.
Being surrounded by people who think that anything involving computers or technology is automatically good and something to be supported and defended no matter the cost to our freedom, humanity or privacy, is incredibly frustrating. As someone who first pushed many of these people towards the internet and technology in general, I almost feel responsible for what they've become.
As someone who has done very well as far as careers go, thanks to an early start with computers and technology as a child in the late 70s / early 80s, I know without a doubt that I'm partially responsible for some of what I hate now, whether directly by way of cash-induced moral ambiguity, or indirectly thanks to projects I've contributed to.
I love technology and progress. I just wish that progress actually meant doing important things, rather than finding newer, more invasive ways to surveil and manipulate people as it has for the past decade or more.
As a programmer, I hate the modern world in general. None of these technologies are for the good of humanity. I once went on a survival camp for a month out in the middle of nowhere. It was the best time in my life. This really is a profound observation. I am sure technology can enrich people's lives. Even out in the middle of nowhere I was using primitive forms of technology. But our modern world is not full of the kinds of experiences that enrich our lives - quite the opposite.
Mobile phones may sound like a good technology until you realise that people are using them because all of their friends are miles away, or because they have to and their boss calls them all the time, or they are so bored at work that they would rather browse facebook.
Cars are something that could allow you to travel long distances but we mostly use them to sit in traffic or travel long distances simply because we have paved over everything around us and nature is so far away. Cars have contributed to pollution and cities that resemble car parks.
To me, and this is obvious from my experience in the jungle, the modern world is a complete failure that has not improved our lives at all.
My best experience in life was away from the modern world. I mean my mental and physical health ended up being completely different by the third week. My experience of life.... I was actually living. I have never felt that since. I feel like I know a secret about the world that others who have never had that experience will ever know.
I have a feeling that modern technology and life is guided by corruption, not by what is best for humanity.
Something that terrifies me, which I'm guessing probably does the same to you, is hearing people talk about how they can't wait to be able to "experience" things in VR instead of having to travel.
That's only one step away from justifying destroying the rest of our planet because we can just "experience" it with technology anyway.
I agree with you in general -- all this stuff Google is doing with data really weirds me out -- but VR is actually really cool! You should try it sometime if you get the chance.
I don't dislike VR. I have a DK1, DK2, CV1, and a Vive. I think it's awesome, and has a lot of potential, but it scares me to see companies like Facebook and Google getting involved, and makes me sad to think about what the future of VR might become as a result. It also makes me sad for the people who will become wrapped up and "live" in VR, thinking that it's a 1:1 substitute for experiencing things in real life, which I'm sure shares at least some overlap with the people who haven't seen the outdoors unless forced since they became a part of WoW. The thing that worries me most in this regard, is that there are people openly talking about how they want this, and how they hope technology makes it so they never have to leave home again.
What's funny is that I'm sure there are people who make lots of money working for Facebook, Google, and others reading this thinking "we're not evil, our slogan even said so! This person is nuts!", but nobody really thinks what they're doing is wrong while they're doing it -- or they wouldn't be. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that..
Yes I agree and it shows you understand my point. When I was working at a boring job, I would spend a lot of time using google street view in different countries. It was a coping mechanism as the job was driving me crazy and I couldn't afford to travel to any of those countries. It is not a substitute for the real thing though. I am sure with virtual reality, it will be a replacement for holidays as nobody will be able to afford holidays anymore. Just as processed food is becoming a replacement for real food.
I guess I just don't get the hate. A large portion of my communication is all about getting the intent across without any need to be a wordsmith. If that can be automated, why not?
If someone sends me a picture of their cute dog, I'll happily acknowledge it. But I don't see the difference between picking a somewhat simple, canned response over writing essentially that same thing out myself. It's about acknowledging that you received their picture and agreeing that it is cute.
There are many things where automating stuff feels wrong. But most of these involve some kind of manipulation: help with writing a sweet message to your lover, optimizing your email response to the particular personality of the person you're talking to so that they'll 'like it more'. Stuff like that.
But automating away things that are kind of inane to begin with doesn't seem like such a big deal to me. It's no different from the 'hello how are you' and 'how was your weekend' talk. It's not quite pointless (in my view), but it's also not something so authentic that any protocol or automation in the matter is a bad thing (in fact, we already do this).
Not every part of every conversation needs to be genuine and engaging. I've found smart replies to be quite helpful for transactional conversations, like setting up dentist appointments and lunch meetings. It's almost like having an assistant pen a response for you when getting the gist of the intent is simple and not every word matters.
Letters to friends, or letters with significance (e.g. a resignation letter) will of course always be written by hand, word for word, but there's room for smart replies to be useful without having it diminish the human race
Id be insulted if people started sending me computer emails instead of physical mails, i find it to be lazy when they wont even bother to go to the mailbox.
A bit tangential, but didn't old symbian phones have the ability to learn what you are likely to say? It feels like this is really pretty derivative but most have short memories...
I agree with the article. My friends and I have a complex lingo we use in our text messages and the lingo itself can sometimes be a topic of the conversation.
The "smart" replies seems to robotic and i'm sure many people would find it rude if they got them.
The reason smart replies seem a bit sad to me is that, unlike new forms of communication that have come before, they don't introduce any new scope for creativity.
Text messages, twitter and snapchat may have made conversations lighter, less substantial and more throwaway, but they have cultivated a rich flora of memes, silly jokes, new ways of sharing. Even emoji, which at first blush also seem like a very lazy way of communicating, have taken on cultural relevance and can be used in interesting and fresh ways.
A smart reply is a smart reply. The best case scenario is that it was close enough to what you were going to say anyway that the small difference in content is outweighed by the reduced effort of not having to type or think. It cannot lead to new forms of creative expression because its very use demands not expressing yourself more succinctly but instead expressing yourself less precisely. Expressing less of yourself.
I suspect a lot of the debate here might end up divided along gender lines.
Men and women tend to communicate differently (of course this is a generalization, and doesn't apply for all men or all women) - with men often valuing short, efficient and informative replies.
I think smart replies are a great advance towards communicating quickly and efficiently - which is the use case for most text conversations. But it is important to realize when we expect communication to be more descriptive and personal.
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[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadI'd reckon smart replies would follow a similar path. Might look odd, but would become natural in a few years.
Text messaging is a lazy way to have a conversation; this is a perfect fit. If you want to have a real conversation, call me, or meet me for lunch. Or do the former to arrange the latter (novel!).
It doesn't mean e-mail isn't perfectly fine for a lot of conversation, but you should expect people to treat it accordingly: You care enough to write an e-mail instead of an IM, but not enough to call them or a arrange a face to face.
Sometimes it's perfectly appropriate to convey that. Sometimes it's not.
The simulated conversation image is a great example. After seeing those responses, the response 'aww so cute' or 'Love the daisy' are about about the same or better than what I can or would care to think of in a text conversation. Is there really a better way to think answer that and why should I waste the time to do so?
Do people on chat with their nearest and dearest? Or do they chat with a mix of people who they may like or even dislike.
It also depends on the discussion. Whenever someone talks to me about something requiring my personal attention, I pay that attention. But most conversations with people are trivial, and expecting someone to drop everything they were concentrating on and pay full attention to your trivial question is, again, a sign of disrespect.
This effect is the only one thing that worries me with those replies. It won't be good if people start to choose only from suggestions instead of choosing them only when they are appropriate. And, as you observed, the effect can be subtle.
But the very idea of a computer typing up the response for you? I don't mind that at all - that's what computers are for, to let you do more with less effort.
> What are you up to?
>> Work.
or
> Want to hang out?
>> Sure.
The suggestions Google provides are a little bit more upbeat and amusing to me.
> What are you up to?
>> I am working!
or
> Want to hang out?
>> I'd love to.
I especially like how it inverts how I'd normally use exclamation marks and periods. "I'm working." "I'd love to!" etc.
Anyway, neat feature. The author doesn't like it, I do, so she can not use the feature and I can use it :P
I don't think anyone is going to think "I'm not really sure if I love my partner, but Google says I do, so I guess I do." I also don't think people are using mobile apps to have the deep types of conversations where this would matter.
Like I said, I see it as a more interesting spellcheck. I usually say things like "yup", Google offers more amusing suggestions that I enjoy.
(Looking forward to the day that that sort of reply can be generated. I'm sure it would be far more fun than "wanna hang?" "ya")
Sometimes I think AI isn't advancing at all, its just that we're all working more and more to fall in line like good automatons...
I love sarcasm, dead-pan, violently black-humour...and I'm watching it all slowly disappear and we all become pidgeonholed, public, on-show, quantised and sanitised.
I'd much rather bring back:
>What are you up to? >> In middle of school shooting. Cops on way. Call you back in 5?
>Want to hang out? >> I'm in the bathroom, so in a way, I already am...
> sends through that picture of child holding flower >> Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he's got... lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah...
Oh, but the two are unrelated you say...
Well no. I'm not certain that they are...
These days, that sounds like something that would make SWAT invite themselves into your house, through a window.
The responses are sure cute and creative. I seriously doubt whoever writes like this today will change their ways because of "smart replies". Most people don't write stuff like that, definitely not during most of the conversations.
I don't really have a formed view yet. I think getting outraged over someone using augmented software to respond faster is wrong, and only a problem with the person who gets outraged. On the other hand I do appreciate the effect of limiting the potential conversation space if people get too dependent those reply suggestions.
It is also true though that a lot of conversations one has over e-mail or IMs follow so common patterns that there were many times I wished I could just automate it away, to have a bot reply to them without the other side knowing. Maybe I'm just antisocial? But I tend to differentiate between requests for information from requests for personal attention, and wouldn't mind having my bot handle all of the former.
(Then again, I wouldn't accept anything except a bot I wrote myself, so maybe I'm not that antisocial - since I'd be just spawning a part of myself as an external process. That's also one reason why I'm so pissed about all the modern bot / AI tech from Google, et al., which has zero configurability, zero ways to plug your own stuff in yourself.)
This seems similar or related to the need people seem to have to remain permanently connected even to people who they only met for a few seconds at a bar once, to increase that ever-important "friend count". Some relationships are meant to end. It's not healthy to try to maintain 1000 vaguely familiar people as "friends".
The ridiculous thing is, most of those "friends" are dreading having to pretend to care about the things you, the guy they met for a few seconds once but feel bad deleting, post on the internet as well. Just stop it. Neither side wins in forced out-of-sympathy/fear/loyalty/obligation/etc relationships.
(Disclaimer: I don't use allo so I don't know what it's capable of. I kind of doubt it's there yet. )
It's not. It's bigger and faster, and being applied to situations it wasn't previously applied to.
Conversions will become more predictable and shallow then they already are.
> Want to Hang out?
>> I'd love to!
>> Nah, I am busy.
In that case, I don't think anyone should have a problem.
[Edit: spelling, clarification]
Then again I remember seeing on the palm pre a feature that showed you notes about the caller on the call screen. Supposed to be for sales people to put stuff like "Wife Jane, 3 kids, Bobby, Sue, Jamal" to read before they picked up.
Is there anything wrong with that? Seems very useful.
(How do people think how previous generations handled having many acquaintances and still knowing something personal about each of them? They noted things down, on paper.)
Anyway he would go on dates about 3-5 times a week with new people. He also ran into a lot of crazy.
He's always been more of a surface level relationship person. We were talking about this last night and he's just coming to grips with having a real relationship that has settled and become comfortable as opposed to awkward. He's somewhat at a loss. I'm telling him that now is when he can really have fun. But that part is anecdoteal I guess.
- always pressing the first option
- randomly choosing an option with their eyes closed
- pressing on the microphone and speaking gibberish or making gutteral sounds
I'd watch that
>Further, I don't care how intelligent these Smart Replies are: They can never capture the personality and character of a real human conversation.
Really? Tell that to the people living in the time before Alphago made it's 37th move and astounded Lee Sedol himself. AI is here, it is as smart or smarter in some areas. The number of such areas is going to grow. Get used to it.
(And while we are on the subject.. There was a blog post back in 2005 about the inverse situation: if the person behind the other screen has the preconception that you are a bot, convincing them of your humanity is nearly impossible. The post now lives as a PDF document.[0])
0: https://msu.edu/~pennock5/courses/ALife/Striegel_Failed_Turi...
This and indoctrination of presence of surveillance is the problem with all those features.
> I can understand canned responses like "Be right there!" or "I'll be late!" if you're in a car and only have a few seconds to reply before you have to get back to the business of driving.
I typically only use them when I'm busy and I see a message and respond to it from my watch.
Are your friends selfishly taking up time trying to talk to you when you could be adding more people to your friends list instead?
Do you have a craving for increased amounts of non-genuine social interaction?
Has your life become so depressingly repeatable that our algorithms can accurately represent your superficial chatter?
If so, we've got something for you: SMART REPLIES!
SMART REPLIES! For when your communication is so valuable and necessary it doesn't need you!
SMART REPLIES! Yum clams! So cute!
SMART REPLIES!...if you thought twitter and social-networking was inane, you ain't seen nothing yet...
Edit: I apologise, i just had a reflex reaction. Wow...this is the world we're making for ourselves...
Should we save our outrage for something more then a feature in an announced chat app?
..and still feel a little bit guilty for being so bloody shallow.
I'm sure this will be downvoted (edit: maybe I was wrong, which makes me feel better yet) because it doesn't really add anything to the discussion, but I've been increasingly depressed about this stuff lately, and hearing/seeing someone else basically put the words in my brain down here, helped a lot.
Being surrounded by people who think that anything involving computers or technology is automatically good and something to be supported and defended no matter the cost to our freedom, humanity or privacy, is incredibly frustrating. As someone who first pushed many of these people towards the internet and technology in general, I almost feel responsible for what they've become.
As someone who has done very well as far as careers go, thanks to an early start with computers and technology as a child in the late 70s / early 80s, I know without a doubt that I'm partially responsible for some of what I hate now, whether directly by way of cash-induced moral ambiguity, or indirectly thanks to projects I've contributed to.
I love technology and progress. I just wish that progress actually meant doing important things, rather than finding newer, more invasive ways to surveil and manipulate people as it has for the past decade or more.
Mobile phones may sound like a good technology until you realise that people are using them because all of their friends are miles away, or because they have to and their boss calls them all the time, or they are so bored at work that they would rather browse facebook.
Cars are something that could allow you to travel long distances but we mostly use them to sit in traffic or travel long distances simply because we have paved over everything around us and nature is so far away. Cars have contributed to pollution and cities that resemble car parks.
To me, and this is obvious from my experience in the jungle, the modern world is a complete failure that has not improved our lives at all.
My best experience in life was away from the modern world. I mean my mental and physical health ended up being completely different by the third week. My experience of life.... I was actually living. I have never felt that since. I feel like I know a secret about the world that others who have never had that experience will ever know.
I have a feeling that modern technology and life is guided by corruption, not by what is best for humanity.
That's only one step away from justifying destroying the rest of our planet because we can just "experience" it with technology anyway.
What's funny is that I'm sure there are people who make lots of money working for Facebook, Google, and others reading this thinking "we're not evil, our slogan even said so! This person is nuts!", but nobody really thinks what they're doing is wrong while they're doing it -- or they wouldn't be. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that..
If someone sends me a picture of their cute dog, I'll happily acknowledge it. But I don't see the difference between picking a somewhat simple, canned response over writing essentially that same thing out myself. It's about acknowledging that you received their picture and agreeing that it is cute.
There are many things where automating stuff feels wrong. But most of these involve some kind of manipulation: help with writing a sweet message to your lover, optimizing your email response to the particular personality of the person you're talking to so that they'll 'like it more'. Stuff like that.
But automating away things that are kind of inane to begin with doesn't seem like such a big deal to me. It's no different from the 'hello how are you' and 'how was your weekend' talk. It's not quite pointless (in my view), but it's also not something so authentic that any protocol or automation in the matter is a bad thing (in fact, we already do this).
Letters to friends, or letters with significance (e.g. a resignation letter) will of course always be written by hand, word for word, but there's room for smart replies to be useful without having it diminish the human race
The "smart" replies seems to robotic and i'm sure many people would find it rude if they got them.
Text messages, twitter and snapchat may have made conversations lighter, less substantial and more throwaway, but they have cultivated a rich flora of memes, silly jokes, new ways of sharing. Even emoji, which at first blush also seem like a very lazy way of communicating, have taken on cultural relevance and can be used in interesting and fresh ways.
A smart reply is a smart reply. The best case scenario is that it was close enough to what you were going to say anyway that the small difference in content is outweighed by the reduced effort of not having to type or think. It cannot lead to new forms of creative expression because its very use demands not expressing yourself more succinctly but instead expressing yourself less precisely. Expressing less of yourself.
I think smart replies are a great advance towards communicating quickly and efficiently - which is the use case for most text conversations. But it is important to realize when we expect communication to be more descriptive and personal.