Tag Archives: Design

Virtual Office Design

By Robin Hanson · January 23, 2012 8:00 pm · Comments (31)

Imagine that you have an office job (as most of you do). Full of meetings, memos, reports, proposals, phone and email ping pong, informal gossip in the hall or over lunch, etc.

Now imagine that you work in a virtual office. That is, while you are actually lying at home in your VR pod (or being an em brain in a data center), you experience yourself as sharing a virtual office complex with your work colleagues. Sitting at your desk working at your computer, talking in a meeting, chatting with a neighbor in his doorway, or perhaps walking the cubicles to feel the buzz.

OK, now ask yourself: how could we design more effective virtual offices, for the purpose of making an efficient workplace not needlessly taxing its workers? For example, what features of office spaces today would we jettison if we could, since they mainly deal with physical constraints that need not apply in virtual reality?

Maybe each person would feel the temperature and humidity they like best. Maybe walls would glow, instead of all light coming from glaring overhead lights. Maybe you’d always feel like you were walking barefoot on soft grass. Maybe all surfaces could be of the most luxurious textures and styles. Your computer “screen” might fill up a wall, or be 3D in a vast warehouse-sized space. But what else?

People might just appear in each other’s offices, instead of having to walk there, but that might feel disruptive. Perhaps hallways could be lots shorter, with each person having a huge personal corner office looking out on a spectacular view. But would it be ok if the shapes and views of offices and halls made no sense relative to each other?

In meetings it might be possible to let each person see and hear others in great clear detail, even adding biometrics on if they felt scared, tired, etc. You might even be able hear their thoughts if you wished. Or at the other extreme, each person might instead be able to project a pleasant attentive appearance no matter how they actually felt. You might even appear to be in several meetings at once. Where along this spectrum would typically make for the most productive meetings?

If each person could make the walls etc. look however they want to, then how will other people know what they are seeing in order to interact smoothly with them? Would you like the ability to look out at any time and see dozens of people as they work, if the cost were that dozens of people could you look at you at any time?

I’ve read a lot about speculation about virtual reality over the years, but I’ve not seen much that took these sort of questions seriously.

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: , , ,

Adapt Or Start Over?

By Robin Hanson · September 21, 2011 2:30 pm · Comments (6)

Sean Carroll has doubts on nanotech:

Living organisms … can, in a wide variety of circumstances, repair themselves. … Which brings up something that has always worried me about nanotechnology … tiny machines that have been heroically constructed … just seem so darn fragile. … surely one has to worry about the little buggers breaking down. … So what you really want is microscopic machinery that is robust enough to repair itself. Fortunately, this problem has already been solved at least once: it’s called “life.” … This is why my utterly underinformed opinion is that the biggest advances will come not from nanotechnology, but from synthetic biology. (more)

There are four ways to deal with system damage: 1) reliability, 2) redundancy, 3) repair, and 4) replacement. Some designs are less prone to damage; with redundant parts all must fail for a system to fail; sometimes damage can be undone; and the faster a system is replaced the less robust it needs to be. Both artificial and natural systems use all four approaches. Artificial systems often have especially reliable parts, and so rely less on repair. And since they can coordinate better with outside systems, when they do repair they rely more on outside assistance – they have less need for self-repair. So I don’t see artificial systems as failing especially at self-repair.

Nevertheless, Carroll’s basic concern has merit. It can be hard for new approaches to compete with complex tightly integrated approaches that have been adapted over a long time. We humans have succeeded in displacing natural systems with artificial systems in many situations, but in other cases we do better to inherit and adapt natural systems than to try to redesign from scratch. For example, if you hear a song you like, it usually makes more sense to just copy it, and perhaps adapt it to your preferred instruments or style, than to design a whole new song like it.  I’ve argued that we are not up to the task of designing cities from scratch, and that the first human-level artificial intelligences will use better parts but mostly copy structure from biological brains.

So what determines when we can successfully redesign from scratch, and when we are better off copying and adapting existing systems? Redesign makes more sense when we have access to far better parts, and when system designs are relatively simple, making system architecture especially important, especially if we can design better architecture. In contrast, it makes more sense to inherit and adapt existing systems when a few key architectural choices matter less, compared to system “content” (i.e., all the rest). As with songs, cities, and minds. I don’t have a strong opinion about which case applies best for nanotech.

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: , ,