How did we get here?
There is more systems for us to learn, more data silos, more duplicated effort, more meetings just to gather all what we know in one place (and hopefully make some decisions), more of putting out the fires, more fast changing information, more distractions and less time. Time that we could be spending on drafting new exciting ideas, extrapolating, cross-division innovating and more importantly — living and having fun.
Technology should serve us, not the other way around like it feels now. Of course, tech has contributed tremendously to connecting people, saving lives, creating communities or making ourselves more informed, but it’s like this double edged sword, that if we don’t know how to handle it, it will hurt us badly.
Better off without?
In his brilliant book “Sapiens”, Yuval Noah Harari argues that quality of human’s life actually diminished when we entered agricultural revolution. He argues, that on the collective level agriculture made humankind far more powerful. However, the individual human being probably had a worse life after the revolution than before.
“Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud. Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.“.
Today we don’t need to hunt for our food and our life became (too) convenient, but we are still slow to predict the effects of our inventions on our productivity and wellbeing.
It’s great that there are so many initiatives helping people participate in progress, such as no-code platforms or online courses where you can teach yourself how to ‘talk’ with a computer and make it do things you want — code. But we still have a long way to democratise and ease access to data we need, so that we can all contribute and grow. We need to cure this human-technology relationship so we are not trapped in easy-fixes which have negative effects in a long run.
Until recently, 9–5 system seemed to be preferred everywhere until it has been proven that there is another way to achieve even greater productivity and happiness. Yet, over the same pandemic period, we started putting ourselves in trouble again. In order to compensate for lack of supervision under one roof, we’ve been sucked into many more Zoom meetings that left us nothing more than tired and unable to do any creative work.
It’s time to revise the way we work.
Rather than adding another temporary band-aid, we need to redesign the way we interact with technology — make it more human-friendly — one that considers human limitations and fallacies, and emphasises our strengths.
I envision a workplace where software understands human intentions and guides us to a solution. Just like Clippy that actually helps rather than annoys us more.
We are great with figuring things out if we have tools and knowledge organised in a neat way. Too much data paralyses us.
That’s why our mission at Untrite is to give people control back over how they interact with data and knowledge in it. We improve your current tech by designing a layer that sits on top of your systems it has access to, understands context and knowledge locked in them and serves all that to you, in bits that you need for a specific use case — just like a helpful colleague would do. And because it learns with your every interaction, it becomes smarter with you.
This is the vision that is built upon real-life business applications.
That’s why we’re now focusing on customer support but we imagine Untrite as a knowledge universe connected across teams globally — where even language isn’t a barrier anymore, and allows you to benefit from insights of all your peers. There are so many other potential applications this this could be useful — predictive maintenance, onboarding, R&D, sales (quotes based on project similarity) … but step by step.
Each one of us have tons of useful knowledge but there is no easy way to share it. Many have tried solving this problem: MS Sharepoint, CRMs, knowledge bases of all sorts etc.. — and all have failed. Just imagine how much more we could all achieve if each of us could share what he knows easily without necessity of putting it in some artificial structure! Where computer could figure things for us, keep the knowledge updated and interlinked with all other relevant information, bearing compliance and permissions.
Sky won’t be the limit anymore.
