Compound Cognition and the Future of Work

The majority of tools we’ll use to do our work in the next decade have not been invented. That’s not hyperbole if you’re involved with machine learning, neural networks, and AI — everything about the way we communicate, collaborate, and learn is about to change.

Consider this: by tonight, the majority of insights generated by your teams today will be lost to the ether. Meetings went unrecorded, documents went unread, lengthy videos went unwatched, whiteboards got photographed on phones to die lonely in digital photo albums, inboxes, and group messages.

The types of tools we use at work largely haven’t changed in decades. Your company’s valuable intellectual capital decays in the minds and tools of its people; the collective memory is unsearchable and rarely transfers to the employees that need to benefit.

Here’s where AI comes in: augmentation, automation, and compounded cognition. The future of work is about tools that effortlessly enrich communication, collaboration, and learning across an organization. To look forward, first consider the past.

Major human accomplishments share collaboration at their core. From exploring new lands to discovering new medicine, whether it’s a team of two or a team of two thousand — working together is essentially compounded cognition. Connected minds solve the hardest problems. And interestingly enough, even in solitude one has imaginary dialogues with others as a means of extracting meaning. Evolution dictated collaboration.

The ability to transfer an idea from one person to another was made possible by speech, and later on, writing. Looking at the evolutionary timeline, writing arrived on the scene fairly recently. For millennia, all we had was verbal language and signaling (think body language). Subsequently, our brains grew a deep capacity to understand one another. Essentially this was the original copy-and-paste: porting an idea from one person to another. Yet it’s more than a one to one transfer.

Verbal communicating, and the general efforts of collaborating with another individual or group, is a state of enhancing the cognitive potential of an individual to more than the sum of the group’s abilities. We owe our advancements to compound cognition. And with AI impacting the tools we use, compound cognition is about to exponentially explode.

The modern company’s idea of knowledge sharing is currently the document, either in the form of a text file (like a PDF, Word doc, or perhaps lengthy email). We have been conditioned to believe that the methodology to get ideas out of our minds flows through writing it down. Writing serves many good cognitive purposes. Yet when it comes to people joined together, authoring text together is too slow. Live collaboration, aka a meeting, involves talking and debating, sketching and diagraming, transferring and learning. Such collaboration has seen little to no progress.

Each day when we come together to work, a massive amount of the intellectual assets we created in that time go to waste. Ideas shared verbally, as my partner and TouchCast CEO Edo Segal says, typically wash away like sandcastles succumbing to the tide of meetings. Our ability to recount and reuse the content from collaboration — the information and ideas — is bound by our cognition, memory, time and space. Otherwise the content travels nowhere, does not cascade, nor is accessible. This era of waste is coming to an end as AI technologies scaffold around the tools we use to work.

Think of the teams throughout your company and how much of the intellectual capital they generate is tucked away in meeting rooms and documents. It’s reminiscent of books before the age of the world wide web, hyperlinks and search engines — the information is hopefully out there, somewhere, but how quickly can you find it… if you can find it? Frustratingly, this is the state of play in practically all organizations.

Now imagine the tool of work, powered by machine learning and deep learning, capturing all the content in collaborations like meetings. The language and tone of speech, the body language and gestures, the whiteboards and shared materials… all analyzed in real time by an AI stack weaving an accessible fabric of memory to be shared to those who need it, when they need it.

In the future of work you will be able to ask for an automated summary of any meeting or presentation you missed. An automatically edited trailer of any team interaction created by a strong AI mimicking the insights of an exemplary researcher. Automatically generated action items from the conversations created by the AI mimicking a well trained project manager.

Retrieval of ideas will be accomplished via intelligent search with proactive suggestions of related institutional knowledge as you work. Imagine being automatically sent information from a meeting one year ago you didn’t even attend with a solution to the problem you thought needed solving. As you conduct meetings, ideas stream to you from prior or currently conducted meetings elsewhere. This is a new age of cognitive compounded returns.

This next generation of tools, those scaffolding our cognitive abilities, will explode the potential of human collaboration. Everything about the way we communicate, collaborate, and learn is about to change thanks to the advancements of machine learning, neural networks, and AI. Of course this evolution from the digital era (where the focus was on facilitating the free movement of documents) to an era of free flow of ideas communicated through every team interaction won’t happen overnight. What might surprise you is to think that video will lead the way.

We’ve been exploring how AI will shape how we work and collaborate through the lens of video for many years at TouchCast. Many people mistake a video as simply a recording of the world through a lens. Video is the most powerful sensor we have. And AI can do so much with video data. Meetings and presentations get auto-summarized, information feeds knowledge management repositories, proactive search equips workers with critical details, even giving a presentation by a novice presenter will end up looking like an Apple keynote thanks to scaffold experiences. The very content of our work becomes exciting in new ways and gets distilled into meaningful, accessible memories for the organization.

Compound cognition at work is what we’re working on at TouchCast. We need partners on this journey as there are many problems to solve. Please let us know your thoughts. Reach me at charley@touchcast.com and check our passion for AI at work at www.touchcast.com