Posted by Lately, I’ve been believing more and more that an artificial manager will look like a human, move like a human, and maybe one day you won’t be able to distinguish it from your former boss at all. When I conducted experiments with students in 2021, led by an artificial manager built from my TransistorsHead.com system, the manager on the screen looked like the one in Figure 1.
Figure 1. TransistorsHead.com’s artificial manager interface
In Figure 1, in the right left corner, you can see the command board where the artificial manager showed what the team is supposed to do at the moment (PRESENT TOOL). The main box shows the online manager tools, which correspond to 10 managerial actions. Participants in the experiment had to respond to the artificial manager’s commands and work according to his instructions. They didn’t like it very much, they usually did something else and complained that the artificial manager had no idea about the task. Why this happened, I will describe in a blog sometime.
But this experiment showed very clearly that a manager, in order to have an impact on the team, must have some sort of recognizable persona. When I see the advances in precision robotics, it seems to me that it’s only a matter of time before there would be SOMEONE.