Yet a step into the software-supported workplace: A robot that takes all the notes at meetings and transcribes the dialogue for later search and retrieval. 

Imagine having all your meetings available for later review, re-watch, and retrieval. These solutions exist, and work. Also, imagine the privacy vs. transparency tensions in those meetings. Do you dare speaking up, risking the fact that your statement will be captured in a searchable database forever? 

“For a long, two-hour meeting—not everybody has to pay attention all the time,” Liang tells me. Why force them to? In the future, he expects there’ll be even better tools for auto-summarizing these long transcripts, making them even more useful.

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There are obvious privacy dangers here. Having all your words transcribed could be “a stifling experience as an employee,” (…) “If your bosses want to fire you, they can rifle through their mammoth files to find something that seems incriminating. Plus, some transcription AIs appear (surprise, surprise) to have racist biases.”

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