Why Can't A.I. Manage My E-Mails?

Chatbots can pass the Turing test--but they can't yet handle an office worker's inbox. One morning last month, I decided to try artificial intelligence on a dire problem: my inbox. In the past twenty years, the e-mail address I use for writing projects has been discovered by a staggering number of P.R. firms, scammers, and strangers with eccentric requests. On this particular day, I had eight hundred and twenty-nine messages. Of the fifty most recent e-mails, the majority were dreck, but about eight were of actual interest, suggesting a hit rate of sixteen per cent--just enough that I had to worry about missing something important.