On the Ethics of Autocomplete

Autocomplete presents itself as a convenience and operates as a curriculum. It teaches you, thousands of times a day, which continuation is likely — and likelihood, repeated often enough, starts to feel like correctness. The most common phrase becomes the default phrase becomes the only phrase you reach for.

This is not a complaint about a feature. It is an observation about scale. A nudge applied to one person is advice. The same nudge applied to a billion people is a demographic force, and we have not yet built the vocabulary to hold anyone responsible for a force.