In the previous episode, our Senior Content Advisor Q McCallum met with product manager Chris Butler to explore the role of uncertainty and how it relates to AI product management.  That conversation sets the stage for Chris and Q to talk about communal computing today.

Chris starts by explaining what shared, AI-backed devices mean for data collection, analysis, and regulation. After that, Chris and Q explore important questions such as: What are some challenges in getting communal computing devices to coordinate?  How do social norms mix with assumptions made by the ML models behind these devices?  What do we lose when we use data lakes? How do product managers and machine learning engineers interact on these kinds of projects? What do communal computing devices have in common with software developers on shared platforms?And, most importantly: what does all of this have to do with the film Napoleon Dynamite ...?

• Chris has published a series of articles on communal computing: Communal Computing intro, Communal Computing’s Many Problems, and A Way Forward with Communal Computing.
• You can also watch some of Chris’s communal computing talks:
• AIxDesign Communal Computing workshop with animistic design mapping
• Bots and AI Meetup - Communal Computing - Solving multi-user Alexa and Google Assistant use cases