Team Human

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 versi