Autopilot, Autoetiquette!

by Anna Post

This April first morning, Gmail, Google's free email platform, announced their latest update with Autopilot*, a service that replies to your emails for you! You'll never be thought rude for failing to reply again!

Not only that, but like all things etiquette, it is thoughtful! It samples your mail to catch the drift of your style! You'll be rated on capitalization, typos, brevity, and emoticon use, and the program will then draft your response accordingly. Think of the time saved!

What a terrific response by industry to the reality of how draining it is to need to be available and responsive to email at all times. Managing relationships is at the core of good etiquette, and Autopilot even analyzes incoming messages and gives you recommendations on whether or not to continue a relationship! (Sample: "Conclusion: Terminate Relationship.") How thoughtful! How helpful! How Google!

*Autopilot, while fake, follows on the heels of Mail Goggles, which (believe it or not) is real. A tool to help fight the good fight to maintain good relationships. Funny as it is, I'd endorse it for anyone who needs a little extra help controlling the email equivalent of a drunk dial--I can't say I've ever heard of one of those that turned out well...

Comments

[Stephen]

The question in my mind is "can we trust the computer?". Years ago, in my class "Social and Ethical Issues in Computing", we approached the question of automation. As to a computer writing your e-mails for you, this may be OK for some things but it is limited in functionality. Additionally, there is the issue of wether or not this automated program will put out the correct correspondance in every situation.

After all, contrary to beleif, computers don't think at all, nor do they "read" the way a human does. Internally, all messages and graphics are stored as arrays of binary numbers. Next, a computer can only do what it is "told" and it will do that very very well as instructions are broken down into opcodes for the processor.

For responding to e-mail automatically, there are limits to what the computer can write out on its on, and some of its replies are based on what you and the programmers that created the autoreply program put in its algorithms.

So I would seriously evaluate using such a program and to see if the correspondance is acceptable before using this kind of automation entirely. More importantly, I would recommend that a human review be done on some incoming e-mails.

[Anna Post]

Hi Stephen,

I couldn't agree with you more. Happily, "Autopilot" was Google's April Fool's joke this year; it's not real. Sorry for any confusion; my post was a tongue-in-cheek April Fools posting about Google's April Fools posting.

The fact that Google chose auto-answering people's emails for the subject of their joke shows to me that they know just how absurd that would be. The very first link in the post takes you to a Wikipedia entry about the April Fool's jokes Google has done each year.

So rest assured!

Anna

[Stephen]

Anna,

I am sorry that I did not realize it was a joke!

Stephen