Oliver Marshall built his own interactive presentation environment in just a few hours using AI, capturing user input via mobile phones over WiFi. His aim was to demonstrate the ‘wisdom of the crowd’: the phenomenon where groups can accurately predict obscure facts and unknowable quantities even when no individual knows the answer. The theory goes that errors cancel out, biases balance, and truth emerges from the aggregate. Spoiler: it did not.
What we discovered instead was that our colleagues are surprisingly united in their diversity (which is to say, united in their determination to disagree). The ability to broadcast emoji opened up avenues for mayhem that the wisdom-of-crowds literature had failed to anticipate. One question secretly nominated a participant to seed an answer, testing whether a confident early response could sway the group toward the truth. It could not: developers will form their own opinions, thank you very much, and your “hints” only make them more suspicious.
The people misbehaved, but the technology was rock solid: a testament to what AI-assisted development can achieve in an afternoon, and a vivid reminder of what your colleagues will do with it.
You can watch the full talk here:
