Workers Are Now Being Offered a Summary of Their Email Before Their Email Has Time to Upset Them Directly
The message arrives, but not before a system steps in to interpret the message and frame what sort of afternoon you are about to have.
Email was once valued for the bluntness of its interruption. You saw the note and dealt with the note. The latest software would prefer to protect you from that directness by offering a summary, a priority rating, and a preliminary emotional translation.
This creates a subtle absurdity. The user is now reading two messages instead of one, the second being the machine's opinion about how efficiently the first message can be tolerated.
There will be cases where the filter helps. There will be many more where it simply turns ordinary communication into a three-party interaction nobody requested.
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