How smart are Gmail's 'smart replies'?

The philosopher Jeremy Bentham was famed for his panopticon, a hypothetical circular prison that was designed in such a way that its inmates never knew whether or not they were being observed. This would, his theory went, encourage prisoners to presume they were always being watched, and thus act accordingly. No true version of the prison was ever really built, and the word itself only now lives on due to its prodigious utility within breathless op-eds about surveillance culture, mostly written by people who've already overused references to Orwell and Kafka. The genius of today's boring dystopia has been to offer this surveillance as a feature, not a bug; to cast that all-seeing-eye not as a malevolent shadowy jailer, but as the world's most boring personal assistant. Nowhere is this truer than with Gmail smart replies, the pocket panopticon that now resides in every inbox.