MIND GRENADES
Microtasks might be the future of white-collar productivity.
WORKERS’
LITTLE
HELPERS
BY CLIVE THOMPSON
Normally, when you open Facebook, you see pictures of your friends’ awesome vacations or links to madden-
ing political stories your dad is sharing—your basic emotional goulash of FOMO and TMI. But last year, the
nerds at Microsoft Research tried something different: They put bits of office work into the News Feed.QThe
researchers created an AI app that looked through documents you were writing in Microsoft Word. It extracted
simple editing tasks, like making a sentence less wordy. Then, using a Chrome plug-in, the software would
slot these jobs into an item in your feed, one every 2,000 pixels. The researchers gave the tool to a test
group, who began duly doing the little work tasks, a few each day, when they saw them while scrolling
through Facebook. Every time they finished one, the AI would automatically insert it back into the proper
Word file.QIt might seem kind of nuts to work that way, yes? But the subjects said they oddly enjoyed
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MIND GRENADES
ILLUSTRATION / ALVARO DOMINGUEZ
