You’re saying that the system’s apparent behavior is by design, but wasn’t that design put forth by employees of the company in question? These aren’t natural phenomena we’re discussing. When a puma tears apart a rabbit, it does so without any influence from the agency of man. Gmail’s “spam filtering” is no such thing: it was deliberately designed to work this way by paid professionals who knew what they were doing.

this is basically equivalent to pretending that as long as no one says "this is my evil plan" before doing something, it's not evil. which even google doesn't bother to try to do anymore.