>To me, it's downright scary that someone would want Google telling them what is important in their own mailbox.
You probably have a much lower volume of email than the suffering email users who want AI algorithms to help them manage their inbox.
The analogy would be something like "Pagerank". You can't lecture a web surfer that he shouldn't leave the importance of web pages to an algorithm like Pagerank. Instead, he should read the 1 billion pages himself to determine which is most important to his search query.
There are not 1 billion emails in an inbox but any number of messages greater than a few hundred is the equivalent in information unmanageability.
It's an inescapable math problem. If you only have ~16 waking hours a day, you may only be able to realistically dedicate ~4 hours to reading and responding to emails. Your allocation of that finite time is a zero-sum game. The math problem: the outside world can stuff more unimportant emails in your inbox than you have the human capability to read and curate. Therefore you must have a robot "reader" assist you.
I understand the discussion, but then that's a very specific use case, which gmail is probably not trying to cover (and it might be a good idea that it stays like that). To be fair, I don't think that's even a good use for email. If you need help with selection from a wide pool of options, then you probably need a more specific tool.
The original programmer for Gmail back in 2001 was Paul Buchheit. The busy people (like his boss Larry Page) with overflowing email inboxes were the first users giving him feedback on how to make it work better for their productivity.
Auto filtering and smart threading are examples of "artificial intelligence" (so to speak) applied to email. Those features came from internally dogfooding Gmail before public release April 1 2004. Later, they added a feature called "Priority inbox" based on machine learning.[1]
What makes you believe Gmail isn't meant to help filter overflowing emails on behalf of the user?
excerpt: "Many Gmail users receive tens or hundreds of mails per day. The Priority Inbox attempts to alleviate
such information overload by learning a per-user statistical model of importance, and ranking mail
by how likely the user is to act on that mail."
You probably have a much lower volume of email than the suffering email users who want AI algorithms to help them manage their inbox.
The analogy would be something like "Pagerank". You can't lecture a web surfer that he shouldn't leave the importance of web pages to an algorithm like Pagerank. Instead, he should read the 1 billion pages himself to determine which is most important to his search query.
There are not 1 billion emails in an inbox but any number of messages greater than a few hundred is the equivalent in information unmanageability.
It's an inescapable math problem. If you only have ~16 waking hours a day, you may only be able to realistically dedicate ~4 hours to reading and responding to emails. Your allocation of that finite time is a zero-sum game. The math problem: the outside world can stuff more unimportant emails in your inbox than you have the human capability to read and curate. Therefore you must have a robot "reader" assist you.