A while ago, I followed a link from Product Hunt that led me to a website called Superhuman. The site didn’t have much to say except a big box that asks for your email and a button below that says “Request Access”. I didn’t make much of that on that day, but I heard about Superhuman on a podcast and decided to look it up.
Apparently, Superhuman is an email client super charged with AI that makes email a super fast experience. Personally, as a person who consciously chose to remove extra tabs like ‘Social’ from Gmail, I detest technology doing too much work thereby controlling what we focus on rather than leaving that choice with us. However, I do agree that there are people in the world that perhaps need something like this to deal with enormous email volume.
The scary things about Superhuman
Undo Send: The option called Undo Send allows people to rescind an email that they’ve sent. It is available as an addon for Gmail which I’ve been using for more than five years. It is great, it allows me to not make silly mistakes like send emails with Typos or forget attaching files etc. I see a large sinister underbelly of this feature.
Message Read Status: In this magical email client, we will now be able to see immediately when someone has read a email or not. It is like blue ticks in Whatsapp or ‘seen’ in Instagram. What could possibly be wrong with this?
In this twenty first century that we live in, we are constantly bombarded with things that bring us unnecessary anxiety.
Did they read the message?
Why haven’t they responded if they did?
Should I say this?
What if she misinterprets it?
Is it alright to say this?
I wish I did not have say that.
In a world like this, where a large percentage of people are facing unnecessary anxiety from skewed ego gratification needs of engineers sitting in silos in Silicon Valley. This adds fuel to fire.
In the real world, you cannot take back words that have exited your mouth.
In the real world, you cannot take back words that you have said. Once words have exited your mouth, there is no way to take them back. You are responsible and accountable for what you say. This the truth of life. When popular apps provide options like “Delete Message” or “Unsend” we are training entire generations that it is alright to say something and take it back without consequence. It fundamentally alters human behaviour.
While I do not have access to this client and hope I never do. I fear the implications it will have on the rest of the world.
Since Gmail introduced Quick replies, I’ve been getting a ton replies to emails from people that say “I’ll do it” or “I’ll look into it, Thanks.” which are definitely responses from Gmail Quick Replies. Sometimes, that is not the reply we are looking for. Had there been no quick replies, people would have taken a minute to write out a proper response that would make sense and add value.
Although the intent of quick replies might be to reduce the typing of frequently occurring words or responses, it has a multitude of secondary implications. What if the message required a larger response that you replied to in one word? What if the entire message was fundamentally flawed? One might argue that the option to respond is still available and it is left to the human to take the final decision. However, as every human also knows, making something convenient encourages the usage of it and vice verse with something that is inconvenient.
Autocorrect is for humans to avoid typos. If it begins to dictate what we type, we are the slaves, not it.
Conclusion
Superhuman is currently in a private invite only beta. It may eventually become open for public. There are some features that are good such as follow up reminders and maybe the spam detection filters are superior. However, building a product from scratch that involves some features that could alter behaviour of people is rife with peril.