Tired: WFH, WIRED: WFX
I had an opportunity last week to share the following presentation as part of an Emerging Technologies session at the American Chemical Society meeting in Chicago. Slides can be found below.
It was a great opportunity to elaborate on a post I’d made last year, where I’d discussed some recent trends in Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing. In particular, the embedding of open innovation activities, accessible to anyone, being embedded in a ‘platform’ (most of the examples to date are ‘inside’ Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing games - or MMORPGs as the cool kids refer to them). To provide some background on this, as a private individual you could be outside of formal ‘working hours’, logged onto EVE Online (an expansive Space Opera), participating in a mini-game, which was itself ‘inside’ of the online world of EVE, and your actions in this mini-game, are translated into meaningful inputs to the act of ‘science’. Some pretty significant person-hours have been put into, for instance, COVID research.
Machine learning seems to have been the focus of the use of this kind of ‘platform enabled serious science’ to date, but the presentation forum seemed like a great place to introduce this to the broader computational chemistry community.
In the final section of the talk, I took the recent work of Walters and co-workers, on the description of a framework for how we discuss and organize research related to Automated Chemical Design; I extended the framework to include input from the ‘crowd’. I’m going to write more about this at a later date - as I think it’s a trivial, but important, additional consideration.
At the highest level, my talk was about how we organize and execute research and development (RnD) activities. And, how some of the ways in which the execution can be framed to be as inclusive and participatory as possible - through the embedding of tasks / games - inside platforms of high '(digital) foot traffic’.
I concluded by discussing the significant possible implications for the ‘future of work’. Forget the tension of ‘working from home’ vs. ‘working from the office’ - what will it mean when we’re ‘working from XBOX’?
