Last year, I was asked to develop a vision for online collaboration for the Planet B project. The challenge: building a community of people that may never be in the same place at the same time. The solution: a mob of bots with an attitude.
Planet B is a thought experiment. It proposes an imaginative scenario: a mission to colonize a recently discovered habitable planet. This planetary expedition requires remote collaboration among team members dispersed across the globe. Rather than relying solely on human team members, I proposed complementing the human members of our team with a mob of bots.
The core thesis shifts focus from humanness to agency. What matters in collaborative work is whether an agent effectively contributes to expedition goals, regardless of whether they're human or artificial. This perspective raises several philosophical questions:
Does it matter whether a coworker is human if their contributions are valuable?
Does humanness become irrelevant if it endangers the mission?
How do we govern an agent network that includes both humans and bots?
The piece acknowledges practical challenges including bot autonomy, bot-to-bot communication risks, and governance structures needed for such hybrid teams. Planet B serves as a counterfactual space to explore these questions safely before real-world implementation.
In thinking through these challenges, we confront fundamental assumptions about collaboration, intelligence, and what it means to be a productive member of a team. The answers we develop in this imaginary space may well inform how we design the collaborative systems of tomorrow.