Fooled!

Wow, they got me, and they got me good. I'm talking about Gmail, folks. And by the way, happy April Fools Day.

I went to check my e-mail this morning and was greeted with an offer to set up Gmail "autopilot." At first I ignored it, thinking, geez, too many technological gadgets. I can't take it anymore. Around my 57th time checking my e-mail today, however, I started wondering what this autopilot thing was really all about. This is what the log-in page for Gmail said:

"Email will never be a thing of the past, but actually reading and writing messages is about to be. Gmail Autopilot automatically manages your inbox better than you can, with zero effort from you. Learn more »

Keep in touch
Brand-new CADIE technology [which, according to the website, stands for "Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity"--sound official to me] enables Autopilot to scan every one of your incoming messages and automatically send the perfect reply.

Manage relationships
Impress everyone with your prompt and insightful responses to everything from urgent notes from your boss to cute messages from your significant other.

Match your style
Autopilot calibrates for tone, typos and preferred punctuation. It's just like you, but automated."

HUH?

So I clicked on "Learn more" and got the following FAQs:

"Does Autopilot work for Gmail chat too?
Yes. Chat was actually simpler to build, given the natural language headway made by Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA [A computer program that reads scripts, according to Wikipedia--ok, still sounds legit]. While many claim ELIZA oft times passed the Turing test, Gmail Autopilot passes with 99.9% accuracy due to the inclusion of human-like qualities such as compassion and wisdom and CADIE's related ability to calibrate to match your chat style.

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."

Wait a minute. So my computer is just going to reply to messages people send me and I won't even know about it? What will it say? What if it says something totally inappropriate? And even more perplexing, it will CHAT for me? So if Tara happens to IM me during the day and I'm away from my desk, my email will just chat with her and all the while she'll think it's me? And what on earth am "I" saying to her?! The more I learned, the more appalled I was. Yes, technology has already taken over our lives, but come on. This is wrong on so many levels.

I was starting to get all worked up, so I called over my cube to my friend Brooke and said "Hey, have you heard of this new Gmail autopilot thing?" Negative. As she was checking out her own Gmail homepage, I decided to see what else I could find out about this turn of events, namely if other people were as astonished (and not in a positive way) as I was. I typed "Gmail autopilot" into the Google search bar and lo and behold, the following three articles were the first to pop up:

"Google's April Fool's Prank Continues with CADIE"
"Internet Hoaxes Launched for April Fool's Gags"
"Google Mail Autopilot Unveiled For All The Fools"

Oh. Damn.

I have to say, kudos to you, Google. You've done it again with your making me want to work for a company that would do something as cool as pull an April Fool's Day prank on the whole world and not have the higher ups deem it "unprofessional." I guess not everyone in the corporate world sucks after all. :)