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I agree and good point on the broader meaning of editorial judgement. If we had seen any negative impact such as the FB/YouTube examples we would absolutely take that into account. I haven't seen anything remotely like yet with regard to smart reply but would want to be the first to see it if it exists.

Your willingness to use "we're optimizing for click through rate" as a defense is quite frightening to me, though.

Someone who thinks "We're optimizing for click through rate" is morally neutral is not qualified to be making these decisions, just as someone who thinks giving lit matches to children is morally neutral is not qualified to be a fire marshal.

Would you agree?

It's a pretty long journey from 'our algorithm chooses which auto-replies to offer you based on which have the highest probability of being selected' to giving lit matches to children.

I'm afraid to ask your opinion of SwiftKey's autocomplete.

That's not quite what I'm saying, though. My concern is not with stating the fact that the algorithm uses this metric. My concern is with presenting the decision to use this metric as morally neutral.

If you think that giving lit matches to children is morally neutral, you probably either don't understand how dangerous fire is or don't understand how unpredictable children can be. That's the point of the analogy.

I don't know what could be more morally neutral than 'we offer the suggestions that you've shown us you're most likely to want to use.' Anything else would be trying to put _their_ words in people's mouths.

And let's not lose sight of the fact that this is a tool that offers an automatic one to three-word email response for when you're too lazy to actually reply. The stakes are about as low as they come.

"As low as they come"? You might be forgetting that Gmail has about a billion monthly active users. Scale matters.

I'm sure you can think of many products that have fewer users, and features in those products that are less central to them than e-mail composition is to a mail client.

Pretty much the entire history of progressivism is a long, slow dawning realization that it's not harmless to treat individuals on the basis of group statistics, for one group category after another. Part of the problem is feedback loops - you can inadvertently amplify subtle perturbations by feeding them back to people. For example, it might seem harmless to subtly nudge a woman away from a career in STEM, on the basis that women are rare in STEM and therefore they probably won't enjoy it. But this action, repeated across millions of people, creates the pattern that you are reacting to. I think the principle probably generalizes to "everyone", not just "women" and "black people".

In the case of autocomplete suggestions, they can still cause harm even when they're statistically likely. What do you think Google would autosuggest for "Blacks are...", if it were around in 1950? What would the statistics on the completion of that sentence look like? And would the effect of someone seeing that list be 100% neutral - or would it subtly nudge them?

There's nothing obviously harmful with the specifics of GMail's auto-suggestions now. But the principle of 'we offer the suggestions that you've shown us you're most likely to want to use' is not morally neutral.

We're talking about auto suggestions along the lines of 'Yes, I have', 'no, I haven't', 'sounds good!', 'yum!'.

I'm not arguing against your principles necessarily, but deploying the argument where it's really not warranted is a form of crying wolf and turns people against it.

And as an aside, at my university the only time I ever saw any recruiting material for STEM, it was along the lines of 'Scholarships for women in STEM'.

It's not a given that it's not warranted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978171

But the point is, whether this particular case is a problem or not, the general attitude that led to its development is a problem, and we're using this opportunity to discuss that (even though the original article is not very coherent).

I think the general attitude of being willfully blind to fundamental distinctions between things that are only superficially similar and shoehorning issue debates in where they don't belong is ultimately unhelpful for the debate over what is, elsewhere, an important issue.

Not everything is a moral travesty; it is in fact okay that people tend to find positive response suggestions more worth selecting.

> Your willingness to use "we're optimizing for click through rate" as a defense is quite frightening to me, though.

I would suggest that if you are frightened by what is essentially an auto-completing on-screen keyboard being optimized for usefulness over making some random person on Hacker News feel it was more nuanced than just trying to be useful... there's probably no way to implement a feature like this, and make it useful, which wouldn't have you shaking in your boots.

Don't be frightened by what is essentially a riff on T9.

Veritasium very recently spoke about algorithm optimizing for click through rate in the context of the bad. https://youtu.be/fHsa9DqmId8?t=783

It seems okay in this case though.

How would you know? And what would your threshold be?

For example, suppose you did a controlled study and found that the new autocomplete UI was presenting users with only "yes" options, X% of the time. Is there a threshold beyond which you would unlaunch or adjust the feature?

What if the new UI was actually changing user behaviour, causing them to answer "yes" more often than they otherwise would have? Is there a delta (positive or negative) beyond which you would unlaunch or adjust the feature? If you had to adjust it, how would you know you were adjusting it correctly?

What sort of telemetry would you need to put in the product so that you really would know if this was happening?

I'm curious if your team thought about these questions before launching, and what ideas came up.

> If we had seen any negative impact such as the FB/YouTube examples we would absolutely take that into account.

Maybe? Maybe not? There’s visible and tangible negative impact from Youtube algorithms (owned, incidentally by the same conpany). And Youtube (or Google? Or Alphabet?) rarely if ever acknowledges and fixes those problems because their algorithms are also optimised for click-through.

In this case click through rate does seem to be the right measure. The feature is most useful when it is suggesting the most likely replies.

I read GP as saying they watched the system's behavior and decided that going by click rates gave the best results. I'd say that is the editorial judgment, in the sense that you're talking about.

If they just set things up to go by click rates and assumed that whatever results occurred must necessarily be preferable, then that would be disclaiming responsibility in the way you describe, but GP's version doesn't sound like that.

It's not editorial it's meta-editorial (metatorial?). They're picking the method that picks the content, not the content itself.

(But this isn't blind -- they're picking the method while watching the output, so it may be a fancy way of picking the exact content you want plus other similar content plus adversarial noise).

So what does good mean in this case, then?

It's easy to say that something isn't good enough if you don't elaborate on what the axis good-bad is.

Totally agreed. My take on it is that all this work on optimising for business metrics is optimising away humanity, and diversity.

It almost sounds like human nature gets in the way of revenue, so it has to be manipulated into something more business friendly.

We won’t consciously make that choice but it often seems to be the consequence.

I think this is exactly right, though it sounds pithy. The same process produces food that is unsubtle, fatty, and highly sugared. It sells really well! But in the long run, it's terrible for us, and also boring - all fast food tastes more or less the same, because the more adventurous it is, the worse it sells. The term frequently used in discourse is "lowest common denominator".

It's a question of capitalism optimizing for local optima versus global optima. What were seeing with the internet is, what happens when we apply this process not just to food, but culture itself?

It is good enough, 2019 doesn't mean we don't reflect user behavior.

Not every recommender is a moral agent. Auto-suggest and conspiracy videos aren't the same thing.

And technically, yes, there's not such thing as a non-editorialized recommender, but this feels like a pointless nit since there's a world of difference between trying to be a reflection vs intentionally not reflecting based on a human-made moral judgement.

What even is the moral editorialization in auto-suggest? It's obvious we don't want conspiracy videos pushed front and center of educational topics, but how on earth do you balance the number of "yes" vs "no"? That's clearly going to be a completely made up number. If you don't have a clear problem to fight, it's probably best to not editorialize just to say you did.

Pretty sure Gmail is a product not a life giving service, they still do tend to optimise for people continuing to use their service. The societal effects of X technology seems to be the new scare tactic buzzword. It's an automated email response used for emails that don't merit an actual response, the slippery slope fallacy doesn't apply here.

I'd apply that instead to their language autocomplete feature(the grayed out text that appears when you start typing and that you can just press tab to insert into your email) which is scary in the way it tries to shepherd your language

A lot of outrage and grandiose claims about misuses of technology, but you didn't really tackle the issue at hand.

What dangers do you see in this specific example. People will be too lazy to type no, if they don't agree?