Playing for Team Human today is interactive artist Lauren McCarthy. Lauren’s thought provoking work brings a unique and creative perspective on social interaction and the intersection of humans and technology.

In this episode, Lauren’s app Crowdpilot becomes the first “advertisement” to be featured on Team Human. Crowdpilot is an app in which real time conversation advice is crowdsourced from online third-party monitors. 

In another crowdsourcing experiment titled Social Turkers, McCarthy hired Amazon Mechanical Turks to participate with her on her own OkCupid dates. The Turks, connected via stream, give Lauren dating advice while she meets strangers in real life.

Lauren also discusses Follower, a service that puts humans into the role of real-time surveillance. Users sign up to be followed for a day, answering two questions: Why do you want to be followed? Why should someone follow you?

And finally, in her most recent project Lauren: A Human Smart Home Intelligence, Lauren attempts to become the human version of Amazon Alexa. What happens when our robot smart home devices are replaced with a real human?

In this conversation with Douglas, the third in our series of live Team Human events at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Lauren helps us reconsider our relationship to social technologies, convenience, privacy, intimacy, and autonomy. 

Next week we’ll conclude our live series of shows from Gray Area with the part two of this show, featuring Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis, Nomad Codes and host of The Expanding Mind podcast. Gray Area founder Josette Melchor will also join the team to share her inspiring story on building a home for digital arts and supporting the local community.

Patrons of Team Human got into these events free. Sustain Team Human by subscribing via patreon.com/teamhuman.

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