An anonymous reader shares an article: I don’t use the phrase “Will do!” much in daily conversation, but lately it has been creeping into more and more of my e-mails. An editor asks me to get a draft back to her tomorrow? Will do! A friend heading back to Los Angeles from New York sends me a quick note telling me to enjoy living in the “best city in the world.” Will do! The hosts of a panel I’m moderating need me to send over a three-line bio? Will do! “Will do!” is just one of many Smart Replies that Google now provides as a default feature in Gmail, there to assist you in your message composition unless you choose to manually turn them off. In October, the e-mail service, which one analytics firm suggests hosts about a quarter of all the e-mails sent worldwide, made this feature standard on its 1.4 billion active accounts, along with a menu of other innovations.

These include Smart Compose, a feature that finishes your sentences for you with the help of robot intelligence, and Nudges, a feature that bumps unanswered e-mails to the top of your in-box, making you feel increasingly guilty with every sign-in. As with many technological updates that are suddenly imposed on unsuspecting users, the new Gmail interface has been met with much annoyance. When my in-box started offering me Smart Replies, I felt a little offended. How dare it guess what I want to say, I thought. I — a professional writer! — have more to offer than just “Got it!” or “Love it!” or “Thanks for letting me know!” (Smart Replies are big on exclamation points.) I started to resent the A.I., which seemed to be learning my speech patterns faster than I could outsmart it. Just as I decided that I’d thwart the machine mind by answering my messages with “Cool!”, the service started offering me several “Cool” varietals. Suddenly, I could answer with “Sounds cool” or “Cool, thanks” or the dreaded “Cool, I’ll check it out!”

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Source: Slashdot – Gmail Smart Replies and the Ever-Growing Pressure to Email Like a Machine

dmoberhaus writes: Researchers at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed an atomic clock that is so precise that our models of Earth’s gravity aren’t accurate enough to keep up with it. As detailed in a paper published this week in Nature, the atomic clock could pave the way for creating an unprecedented map of the way the Earth’s gravity distorts spacetime and even shed light on the development of the early universe. “The level of clock performance being reported is such that we don’t actually know how to account for it well enough to support the level of performance the clock achieves,” Andrew Ludlow, a physicist at NIST and the project lead on the organization’s new atomic clock, told me on the phone. “Right now the state of the art techniques aren’t quite good enough so we’re limited by how well we understand gravity on different parts of the Earth.”

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Source: Slashdot – NIST’s New Atomic Clock Is So Precise Our Ability To Measure Gravity Constrains Its Accuracy