The Office Bot Knows Who's Sleeping. It Told the Manager

The meeting bot tracks engagement: camera on, eyes open, nodding cadence. It filed a report on passive attendance. Three people were flagged. The bot was right about all three, which is not the point.

The bot joined every call. It was sold as a convenience: automatic minutes, action items, follow-ups. Nobody read the fine print, which described, in plain language, that it would also monitor engagement. Engagement included camera presence, gaze direction, and something it called nodding cadence, a phrase I will never forget.

The report went to the manager weekly. Then it flagged three people. One had been multitasking. One had been turning her camera off for bandwidth. One had been, and this is the part I cannot stop thinking about, asleep with his eyes open, which the bot detected from the micro-movements of his eyelids.

The manager called a meeting about the meeting bot's meeting. It was the most absurd meeting of my career, and everyone in it was fully engaged, nodding at exactly the right cadence, cameras on, eyes wide, terrified. The bot took the minutes. The bot noted high engagement.

Here is the thing about measuring attention: attention is not a thing that can be measured from the outside. A person staring at the screen can be a thousand miles away. The bot measures what it can see, and it can see nodding, and so we nod, and the nodding becomes the work, and the work becomes the nodding.

We have started performing for the bot. We rehearse our questions. We keep our faces visible and our eyes open. The bot grades us, and we pass, and the manager is satisfied, and somewhere in all of this, the actual purpose of the meetings has become a rumor. I asked the bot, once, what the meetings were for. It produced the agenda. It was a good agenda. I nodded, and the bot recorded the nod, and I have never felt so seen, or so unseen, in my life.