Institute For The Future

From #10YF2014: Co-Present Microwork

Face-to-face has long been the gold standard for human interaction, against which other media, from video conferencing to text chats, have been measured. But as we begin to see microwork at unprecedented scales—breaking tasks down into their tiniest components and assembling outsized teams of people from any place on the planet—we need a new standard. And over the next ten years, that standard may turn out to be co-presence.

The 2014 Ten-Year Forecast Annual Retreat explored the landscape of change over the next decade by inviting attendees to contemplate ten projects that—if successfully undertaken today—could change the paradigm in their fields in the next ten years. These bold projects are already taking shape in the dark underside of the internet, in the foundations of our global cities, in the building blocks of our economies, and in the microbes of our bodies and our planet. They are rapidly recoloring our world.

During the retreat on May 1-2, Sara Skvirsky examined the potential of a new paradigm of co-present microwork to transform the way we cooperate at extreme scales.

 

We are already seeing wide-ranging efforts to improve remote communication:

• Tools that can track our conversations to provide contextual information in real time— and to create robust records of past conversations
• Plug-ins that analyze speech and facial expressions to offer real-time feedback to users about conversational style
• Hyper-local environmental beacons that allow information to be pushed to people in the exact right place and time 

And while it might seem like wearable devices, machine algorithms, and AI-enhanced conversations would strip away the humanity from our interactions, in fact, they are going beyond the affordances of face-to-face presence to augment some of our most human capacities.

• Wearables provide detailed feedback of physical and emotional states, enhancing self-observation to improve our interactions with one another.
• Machine algorithms help us add nuanced perspectives to our conversation streams, potentially helping us see beyond our biases and blind spots.
• AI tools scan video streams to summarize the narratives, distilling the dense flows of human communication into meaningful nuggets.

What if we could collate these early experiments and give microworkers a co-presence toolkit that augments our ability, as a species, to cooperate at extreme scales? Perhaps this kind of co-presence has the capacity to change the way we experience microwork, and in particular, to reverse some of the negative impacts of microwork—such as diminished feelings of self-worth, loss of pride in our work, and the feeling of being a cog in a not-very-human system. 

The challenges are real—technologically, this vision depends on a level of AI that is only just beginning to animate our tools, and the level of monitoring of people and contexts will constitute yet another assault on our collective sense of privacy. But if the co-presence toolkit were to succeed, we might expect to see a future with:

• Context-aware time management that disrupts traditional work calendars, time management practices, and even organizational management structures
• A culture that values attentional proximity over physical proximity
• New contextual vocabularies that use gesture, color, form, and sound to support cognitive performance and emotional well-being in distributed group work.

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This post is from our 2014 Ten-Year Forecast, which explores 10 bold projects that have the potential to change the world over the next 10 years. In the coming weeks, look for more about the projects and the futures they would make.

Curious about the Ten-Year Forecast Program?

• Follow the projects at @iftf, #10YF2014, and #10projects10years
• Take a sneak peek at our plans for 2015
• Find out more about the Ten-Year Forecast program
• Check out previous years' Ten-Year Forecast research
• Contact Sean Ness ([email protected])