21 May 2015
A robot amongst the sharks
by Chin Chin
If you’re looking forward to the time when a driverless car will sweep you towards your business meetings as you prepare the paperwork in the back, you may be due for something of a disappointment. Before long, you won’t be going to business meetings at all because it will be just as easy, and a good deal cheaper, to send a robot. Imagine the scene; there are half a dozen serious looking people around a table and in strides a charming and well-dressed man in a Savile Row suit. He shakes hands with everybody, put his cards upon the desk in the correct order and sips his coffee with impeccable manners. There are two reasons why nobody can tell that it isn’t really you. The first is that they haven’t met you before and do not realise that you are not charming and well dressed and have an unpleasant habit of slobbering as you drink your coffee. The second is that the robot speaks with your voice, receiving messages by satellite and instantly relaying the other side of the conversation back to the deck chair which you inhabit by the pool, so that you can formulate its replies. No doubt it will be programmed to put in a little small talk until it gets directions as to the line to take. Halfway through the meeting you say, or rather the robot says with your voice, something which upsets the chairman. A gap opens in the floor and the robot’s chair tips backwards. It is down in the tank with the sharks.
What happens next depends on how much you spent on your robot. Is it the Tesco model, unable to deal with sharks and deep water? Alternatively, is it the full John Lewis, able to kill the sharks with its teeth before rising from the water like a missile, despatching the chairman of the meeting and reporting back to you an hour or so later in a suit of Bond-like elegance? Either way, it isn’t you in the pool with the sharks – that has to be a plus.
Alas it won’t really be like that in real life because everyone will know that you can send robots to meetings; so before long robots will often be the only people there. Put like that, you wonder if it will really be an improvement on the conference call because, although the robots might have a good time – whatever that may mean, none of the participants pulling the strings will get the advantage, or possibly disadvantage, of physical presence.
That is going to add a new dimension to meeting strategies. At the moment the theory is simple and fairly well understood. Use a small room if you want to achieve agreement because people trust each other more when they are crowded together. Move the meeting to a bigger room if you want to slow things up or if you would prefer that no agreement was reached. Everyone knows that or at least everyone except for those institutions which believe that a big room draws attention to the importance of the chairman. They never agree or do anything of use at all. That is the reason why, and I may say the only reason why, David Cameron and Nicola Sturgeon should hold their negotiations in the back of a mini.
So far: so simple, but the question of whether to attend a meeting or to send your robot will be more difficult. Some of the rules are obvious. It would not be right to send a robot to a meeting in an expensive restaurant or at a major sporting event. That’s not because you want to go yourself, of course. Oh dear me no, it’s just that there is a social side which the robot might not get quite right. Then there are the meetings with a particularly attractive a member of the opposite sex. Too nuanced for a robot by half!
But what if everything else is equal? Is the advantage with the negotiator who sends the robot or with the individual who attends in person. A recent study by the University of Bath has shown that a robot does better in negotiations with a human if it begins by shaking the human’s hand. That means that humans are affected by gestures even when they know that there is no real feeling behind them. Actually that’s hardly news. Most of us are capable of sufficient self- deception to be charmed by courtesies which we should know to be entirely empty. You hear it every day. “No, the waitress wasn’t looking for a tip when she gave me that smile. It is just that she fancied me a bit.” “Of course it’s my personality which they appreciate, not the fact that I’m head of the company.” “I am quite sure his parents would still have sent me the chocolates if they knew that I had already marked the exam papers.”
Robots will have the advantage that this sort of susceptibility can be programmed out of them. Having been given their instructions they will approach the negotiations logically and coldly. It will be the human beings in the room who are at a disadvantage.
“Just get your robots to talk to my robots,” the business chief of the future will say to his counterpart as they chat together in the “no robots allowed” bar at the Savoy. Then the robots will get together and negotiate according to their instructions and, because those instructions were given to them in advance and because human beings do not exhibit much flexibility at the beginning of negotiations, nothing will ever be agreed. Still, at least no one ends up among the sharks.
