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Resist Google’s Attempts to Make You a Robot
We’re training machines to think this is how humans actually converse
Users of Gmail—and there’s a good chance that’s you—have noticed an “upgrade” in the service recently, in which you have been given the opportunity to respond to a message with a few short phrases. You may have been on the receiving end of such an autoreply already, and perhaps you have used one too: They’re easy, convenient, often intuitive, and can go a long way toward reducing inbox clutter. A few articles have even appeared about the love and fanfare for the new feature.
There are certainly times when a short programmatic response to an email does the trick. Email threads that are near the end of their useful life are best killed off efficiently—when all you need to do is accept or reject a simple proposal, confirm a time or place of meeting, or indicate that you have completed a task. But these situations by no means represent a majority of emails, and the temptation to treat other more complicated or nuanced emails like that don’t often have a happy ending.
Here’s an email I received from a friend a few weeks ago:
