Digital Literacy Centre

The Automation of Social Life

April 1st, 2009 · No Comments

This is a quote, perhaps scary, certainly funny, from the information page explaining Google Mail’s new feature, “Autopilot,” designed to ease workload by allowing a bot to answer your Email when you don’t have time:

What happens if a sender and recipient both have Autopilot on?

Two Gmail accounts can happily converse with each other for up to three messages each. Beyond that, our experiments have shown a significant decline in the quality ranking of Autopilot’s responses and further messages may commit you to dinner parties or baby namings in which you have no interest. (See Autopilot)

An April Fools prank, perhaps?

Tags: April Fools