Speculative Futures (meetup) - San Francisco, CA - July 31, 2018; "The Future of AI in the Workplace" - 1-hour presentation of some very-near and near future design ideas.

1. THE FUTURE OF AI
INTHEWORKPLACE
Design Futures Analyses and Hypotheses
Stacey Seronick

2. Who’s Stacey Seronick?
■ Designing, writing, researching, and strategizing for products, services, and brands for
over 20 years
■ Have consulted on expanding the multimodal interaction design for a robot with a
spoken and visual UI
■ Current day job encompasses conversation design for enterprise virtual assistants
■ Spare time: paint, enjoy looking at the beach, compulsively eavesdrop

3. CURRENT AND
NEAR-FUTURE EXAMPLES

4. 1.Weaponized Smart Homes…what
aboutWeaponized Smart Offices?
■ A ficticious example of smart home technologies gone awry -The Charnel House
(2016) –Trailer
■ Some very real examples of smart home technologies used as a tool of abuse and
torment from a recent NYTimes article
– If you are a victim of this kind of abuse, there is an online resource for you at
https://www.techsafety.org/confidentiality

5. 2. News and intelligence communities –
automated synopses of world events
■ Automated reporting (one-pagers) and story-building (synopses of trends and events
based on very large, real-time data sets - https://primer.ai/
– “Our engines generate millions of statistical observations about entities and their
relationships.We use a Bayesian model of surprise to rank these observations.The story
emerges from a massive reduction in the dimensionality of these data and text
generation via extractive and abstractive summarization…”

6. 3. Fashion – personalized predictive upselling
and true-to-you, 3D changing rooms
■ For personalized upselling (http://zugara.com/, all tech based on use of Kinect)
■ AR/digital dressing rooms:
https://www.avametric.com/
for Gap,AnnTaylor, and more
■ True-to-you avatars:
Punk Office
https://www.punkoffice.com/avatar_process

7. 4. AIs as CBT* practitioners/therapists
and therapists for humans
■ Woebot,Youper apps are CBT-based chatbots designed to do what therapists
practicingCBT do for patients – reframing thoughts and helping with mindfulness
– https://woebot.io/
– http://www.youper.co/

8. SPECULATIVE FUTURE
EXAMPLES

9. 1. ProfessionalVirtual Agents:
AI helping humans to do better work
■ Agentive AI that can do ”automated” parts of your job for you – the non-physical
version of “co-bots”
– Works in tandem with human to ensure best work is being produced in most efficient
manner, allowing bot and human to each do what each does best
– Allows for a 2-in-the-box or even 3-in-the-box management arrangement

10. 2. AI ServiceWorkers for other AIs:
Humans helping AIs to aid other AIs in doing
better work
■ “Therapists” – personality adjustments and behavior modification
■ “Mechanics” - algorithm diagnostics, evaluation, and tuning
■ “Teachers” – narrow trainers

11. 3.VR, AR, MR, or Photo Stylist for
professional (and personal) appearances
■ AI dedicated to ”fixing” your
hair, makeup, even clothes and
accessories for both “real,” real-
time photos (personal and
professional use) as well asVR
and MR real-time appearance
changes (for professional
appearances)

12. WHAT DO YOUTHINK?
Questions?Thoughts? Ideas?

13. THANKS!
sseronick@gmail.com | @esteayceeeewhy