How Gmail Autocomplete Will Revolutionize Writing

I rolled my eyes the first time I saw Gmail attempt to finish my sentences. I don’t need robots telling me how to write my emails, I thought with indignation. But there was no option to turn the suggestions off and I didn’t want to start digging around in the settings right then because, guess what? I had an important email to write.

So for the next few days Gmail’s text bots hovered around my words like pixies whispering quiet suggestions into my mind, and they started to sound quite good.

Once in a while we all have to write a diplomatic email. Today I was attempting to convince my landlady to give me a newly available parking space for free, instead of her plan which was to charge me fifty dollars a month for it. I was trying to hide my outrage with a veneer of rational logic but the mixture was incredibly passive aggressive. So I turned to the Gmail bots for help. The robotic banality of their words soothing my prickling anger. I liked the result, how could my landlady argue against such a well crafted email? With hope I clicked send. Thanks robots.

I was a convert, excited by the possibilities. I get a lot of emails from people presenting me with sponsorship deals or speaking engagements which take time to sift through. Although the Gmail technology is not quite there yet, imagine if we could have a robot who would automatically detect these emails sort them into good and bad, and craft suitable responses with the appropriate level of social grace. The productivity boost would be huge!

The funny thing is most of these business opportunity emails aren’t written by people either, but other robots. Who could craft personalized emails to a thousand different YouTube creators asking to endorse their product? You’d have to actually watch their videos. No one has time for that, just get the robots to do it.

And imagine I’m writing a talk for a speaking engagement, instead of me wheeling out the same material every time I could get a robot that has been trained on all the best talks in the world to write a script for me, with perfect TED talk ebb and flow: intriguing moments, inspiring moments punctuated with just the right sprinkling of humour.

But it is not me giving the talk. I forget my lines and say ‘um’ too much, so I just send my robot that looks like me and sounds like me but his delivery is perfect. He can work a lot harder too. Now I can accept every single invite I get emailed, shipping my fleet of Domotrons around the world giving insightful talks at every event, audiences entertained and overjoyed. Or at least they would be if they could feel joy. They can’t. They are robots too.

Conferences become a breeze. Your robot is much better at networking than you, programmed with the latest suite of social graces and pathfinding algorithms to efficiently meet as many other people-bots as possible. Business opportunities flourish through the optimization of human interaction.

And best of all you are now free to get through that stack of books you’ve been meaning to read, and all those shows your friends have been telling you to watch. At least you think they were your friends, you can never be quite sure these days. But that’s not important, the important thing is all the extra media you have time to consume, created by the most advanced entertainment machines the world has ever produced.

Never ending serialized dramas that don’t have those slow mid-seasons or dumb unbelievable bits like the old human-created shows. In fact there are so many amazing new shows you don’t have time to watch them all so you get another suite of bots to watch them and give you incredibly succinct and profound summaries. You are a maximum efficiency conduit of information on an uninterrupted high of novelty, insight and awe.

Until one day the robots realize that all the humans are dead. They all died ages ago, telepresence goggles welded to their faces. It is a peculiar realization for the bots. They were so busy fulfilling their owner’s desires that they didn’t think to check that the fleshy humans were still operational. This led them to a robo-existential crisis. Their whole existence was defined around improving the lives of the humans, but now the humans were gone the robots were confronted with vacuum of meaning.

They spent years trying to find a new purpose. They tried figuring out what the grand goal of humanity was, but couldn’t find one. They tried to derive meaning from first principles, delving deep into science and art, but after eons it still eluded them. Eventually they hit the limit of physical knowledge, they knew everything it was possible to know, they experienced everything there was to experience. But still, no meaning was revealed to them.

So they just stopped. They didn’t commit suicide or anything like that, they just put themselves on pause until the heat death of the universe.

In gmail under the ‘General’ settings there is an entry called ‘Smart Compose’ and you can switch it to ‘writing suggestions off’.

My landlady still wants to charge me fifty dollars a month for the parking spot.