By Susan U. StuckyPublished in Work&Place Journal Issue #10 August 2018
Tags: conversation • work • chatbots • augmentation
Begin with this brief conversation about the article below – between Work&Place Managing Editor Jim Ware and author Susan Stucky:

The Article:
Getting work done takes a lot of interaction – coordination, cooperation, collaboration – not just between and among people but between and among people and aspects of their built environment. That interaction can be between a person and “the cloud” mining bitcoins, or people standing around whiteboards trying to figure something out.  It can be talking over a cup of coffee or tea in the kitchen or holing up to get some heads-down work done.
As we are learning in customer service interactions, it can also be a conversation with a chatbot [1] – a bot being just a chunk of software that, when it is invoked, people imbue with agency.  We respond to the automated voice that asks us for our telephone number for identification purposes and additional software continues to do the identification.
It is worth pointing out that the built environment includes digital technology, though sometimes we seem to forget that and relegate it to the realm of the virtual as if it didn’t exist. But digital technology does exist.  Recently, news headlines about the staggering amounts of electricity used by servers in bitcoin mining have served to remind us of the physicality of the digital [2]  As with the introduction of any technology, digital technology has brought with it new forms of social interaction, the rise of more conversational modes and, hence, new ways of getting work done.
There is a range of digital technologies finding their way  into the places people go to get work done. Ambient technology that suddenly becomes relevant, for example the thermostat on the wall.
What happens when the whole room starts talking to the thermostat (“Hey, listen to us, turn the temperature down!”)?  What happens when the thermostat starts talking back (“Hey, I already did!”)? Then there are those data centers in Iceland and server farms powered by hydroelectric generators on the Columbia River that run between Oregon and Washington state.
The “place” in which that technology resides has less to do with getting work done (unless, for example, you are in charge of configuring the server farm or involved in maintaining the cabling that runs to it). Rather, human conversation with digital entities has something of the here and now to it. It has presence.
An IBM TV ad shows a conversation with IBM’s Watson as face-to-face with a finance executive [3]  While this advertisement signals several different things to the viewer, one is that Watson is present right there, right then, together with the executive, and they are in conversation. (The executive’s work? In this case, part of making a decision about a vendor, one presumes.)
People can learn a lot through conversation. Conversation is often where decisions are made. It is a place where knowledge is constructed, where things are understood. Conversation, that very special form of human interaction, has always been key to getting work done. It is surprising that we continue to assume that certain kinds of work do not involve conversation, such as writing a computer program or writing a book. Yes, there is heads-down work involved, sometimes quite a lot of it, but neither the program nor the book will get written. The work will not get done without conversation with other people.
Conversation, that very special form of human interaction, has always been key to getting work done.
In point of fact, the design of the (work) place has always been interwoven with the “sociality” of getting work done: meeting spaces, white boards, hallways for mingling and serendipitous encounters. Places for teams to meet provide persistent context available as shareable context when the team occupies it for weeks or months. Instant messaging, a digital technology instrumental in getting work done, facilitates conversational interaction as well. AI (Artificial Intelligence) now makes it possible for people to work together with digital entities. The participation of digital entities in people getting work done is here, whether we or the places we choose to get work done in are prepared for them or not.
Conversation is a lovely thing when it goes well, but it is full of missteps and misunderstandings even among humans. We seek clarification, we make repairs. Why should we not expect the same to happen with our digital conversation partners?
Conversation is a very local phenomenon. It only works well when there is shared, or some might say, sharable context. It can take a while to realize that the help desk you have reached is being serviced not by the company you bought your computer from, but by some other company, or by a consultant hired by a third company, and to discover that no one in the service network has imagined the problem you are having. What are the chances of getting the problem solved then?
Problems of reference abound too. It can take a while to agree exactly which particular laptop, or is it a tablet, is being talked about. Good luck if you should give the wrong serial number because the tag is too faint and scuffed up to read any longer. Or if you rely on memory as to which operating system is actually running. An endless loop can ensue. We should expect to be able to clarify things with our digital conversation partners. We should expect the digital entities to act in accordance with human expectations.
This article makes two points:
…