OK brain, you can stop thinking now

Recently, Apple had its Siri join the battle with Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Assistant by showcasing the HomePod speaker with Siri built-in. For now, it’s a little behind the others and is a music-first speaker, but it’s probably a matter of time before everything we do is ably assisted by a ‘personal assistant’ that gets more personal by the minute.

A few weeks ago, Google slipped in some smartness into Gmail. Unsuspecting users suddenly noticed three reply options sitting at the end of every email coming to them. Got it! Thanks for the mail. What is this? That’s a good one . And more of the kind. For those who have been on Google’s messenger, Allo, these canned answers aren’t altogether new, but for anyone who hasn’t had that experience, welcome to smart replies. You can stop wasting time over how to start your mail and say thanks to Google’s machine learning, which will keep supplying better and more intelligent answers for you to start off with — or use as the only reply if you have a mind to.

And oh yes, Google is reading your mail — but it already was, so let’s not worry over that now.

If you look at these smart replies, you’ll notice that they’re quite impressive. Spam and promotional mail doesn’t include the reply options and that’s a good thing because spam can easily be scam to which you are not meant to reply. Amazingly, I find that “it” is distinguishing between different types of mail I tend to get from PR agencies. If a press release is written too over-the-top, I see no options to reply. If it’s written informatively, I get an option that says Thanks for the information or Thanks for the heads up .

Smart replies aren’t really meant to stop you thinking at all, but if you’ll just take a look at them on Google’s Allo messenger, you’ll do exactly that sometimes. It takes a blink of an eye to tap the appropriate reply presented to you and much longer to form one in your head. Google may not take smart replies so far as to write your entire mail for you, but the way artificial intelligence, machine learning and the understanding of natural language is progressing, it wouldn’t be wrong to wonder what it’s doing to our own capacity to think, work out, increase our own learning, and form our own responses to the world.

With all the tech majors — Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook — and hundreds of startups and companies working on steroids on the area of neural networks and machine learning, it is alarming to even imagine what this is going to do to change humanity in the long term. Will we need to think at all? And by the predictions of how robots endowed with as much if not more intelligence than us taking over peoples’ jobs in every area, the alarm bells are certainly ringing. And it isn’t just thinking, but practically every kind of physical activity that technology is taking over.

Robots can now milk cows on farms while the farmer watches Netflix, robots can run an entire hotel, make decisions for managers, write corporate reports and compose music. Their artificial intelligence is getting alarmingly less artificial by the minute. And as is obvious from even the little bits of smart stuff they do for you already, are only poised to grow exponentially. It’s only a matter of time before everything connected in one’s home begins to talk, make decisions, take action thanks to built-in assistants.

Scientists are worried that we are outsourcing our very memory to Google and the internet. Rather than bothering to remember something, we index where and how we can retrieve the information instead. Rather than bothering to work out something, we look it up. What kind of repository our brains will become given all of this, is anybody’s guess.

Meanwhile, assistants are going to be second guessing us at everything and getting better at it every day.