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Autocorrect may fix some of your mistakes, and make some amusing ones of its own. But will its successor correct more than your spelling, essentially hijacking your personality?

The philosopher Evan Selinger raises this concern in an interview with David Berreby of BigThink. Their jumping-off point is the predictive text feature in Apple’s upcoming iOS 8, which promises more sophisticated suggestions than the old autocorrect. From Apple’s website:

“As you type, you’ll see choices of words or phrases you’d probably type next, based on your past conversations and writing style. iOS 8 takes into account the casual style you might use in Messages and the more formal language you probably use in Mail. It also adjusts based on the person you’re communicating with, because your choice of words is likely more laid back with your spouse than with your boss.”

Mr. Selinger says he’s “horrified” by this innovation. He explains:

“The more we don’t autonomously struggle with language, grapple to find the right word, muscle through to bend language poetically, the less we’re able to really treat conversation as an intentional act. As something that really expresses what we’re trying to say.”

He fears that “we’re starting to find more and more cases where what we want to communicate to people will be automated.” And, he adds:

“Predicting you is predicting a predictable you. Which is itself subtracting from your autonomy. And it’s encouraging you to be predictable, to be a facsimile of yourself.”

Will iOS 8 make us boring by substituting a “predictable” self for the actual, error-prone version? At least, he argues, it might make our lives less enjoyable. He cites the philosopher Albert Borgmann’s argument “that we only find real meaning in our lives in these instances where we’re focused and attentive and building up skill” — anything that makes talking to other people too easy might deprive us of this meaning.

The brave new world of iOS 8 will be upon us soon, but for now, we have to content ourselves with plain old autocorrect. Some have seen this soon-to-be-obsolete system as a defender of linguistic conventions. At The Atlantic, Joe Pinsker writes:

“Autocorrect, the now-ubiquitous software that’s always reading over our shoulders, tends to put apostrophes in when we omit them — which means they might remain a feature of informal writing for longer than they otherwise would. The software may also prop up other formal conventions, among them capitalization and ‘silent’ letters (like the u, g, and h that drop out as though becomes tho.”

And, he adds:

“The software company Nuance, which invented the predictive-texting technology known as T9, is developing autocorrect software capable of suggesting more-substantive grammatical changes, like proper verb conjugation. Which means that we could soon be texting like the grammarians our software wants us to be.”

This might not allay Mr. Selinger’s concerns. Software that corrects our grammar might well lessen the amount of time we spend, as he puts it, struggling with language, and might circumvent the kind of focus and attention he endorses (even if it does make us sound smarter to one another). However, he might draw some reassurance from another, more anarchic feature of autocorrect: its famous/infamous capacity for error.

In his history of and meditation on autocorrect at Wired, Gideon Lewis-Kraus notes that the feature does, indeed, shape the way we communicate, but not always in predictable ways:

“By the early 2000s, European bureaucrats would begin to notice what came to be called the Cupertino effect, whereby the word cooperation (bizarrely included only in hyphenated form in the standard Word dictionary) would be marked wrong, with a suggested change to Cupertino. There are thus many instances where one parliamentary back-bencher or another longs for increased Cupertino between nations. Since then, linguists have adopted the word cupertino as a term of art for such trapdoors that have been assimilated into the language.”

Autocorrect errors may even birth new languages:

“A commenter on the Language Log blog recently mentioned hearing of an entire dialect in Asia based on phone cupertinos, where teens used the first suggestion from autocomplete instead of their chosen word, thus creating a slang that others couldn’t decode. (It’s similar to the Anglophone teenagers who, in a previous texting era, claimed to have replaced the term of approval cool with that of book because of happenstance T9 input priority.)”

Of course, autocorrect mistakes are also funny, and Mr. Lewis-Kraus argues that we’re driven to make meaning from their humor, however unintentional it is:

“The possibility of linguistic communication is grounded in the fact of what some philosophers of language have called the principle of charity: The first step in a successful interpretation of an utterance is the belief that it somehow accords with the universe as we understand it. This means that we have a propensity to take a sort of ownership over even our errors, hoping for the possibility of meaning in even the most perverse string of letters. We feel honored to have a companion like autocorrect who trusts that, despite surface clumsiness or nonsense, inside us always smiles an articulate truth.”

It’s possible that predictive text will take us to a whole new level of autocorrect weirdness — a more ambitious form of correction could lead to more outlandish ways of being wrong. And it remains to be seen whether the new feature will indeed automate the way we talk — or offer us a new kind of language to joke about, riff on and make our own.