Engagement Software

Existing software that comes closest to the "humanity engine" concept, though without AI features, is called "customer engagement software". A popular commercial product in this category is called Moxie. As described in this video from 2010, Moxie provides two products, a customer engagement component and an "Employee Engagement Space" component. The employee engagement component has "activity streams" that are comparable to the "humanity engine" idea of conversations in that they are near real time streams. They do not, however, enforce the "turn taking" concept of a conversation. Anyone can add to a stream at any time. Facebook's "News Feed" is an example of an "activity stream".

In a typical chat application, of course, you do not have to wait for others to respond before adding another message to the conversation. If the "humanity engine" design is extended to allow additional continuation before response from both the user and the platform agents, then you may have something like activity streams.

The question arises, though: what, if anything, motivates progress toward a goal in the case of an activity stream? In a conversation, the user expects a response that is, well, responsive, that is, relevant and helpful. When you post to an activity stream, you're not really expecting a response and no one is really responding to previous postings. The conversation model, even if it allows multiple "extensions" of postings before receiving a response, has the expectation that a query will generate a response and so motivates progress towards an "answer".

It seems that the conversation model is therefore stronger in this respect than the activity stream model. The conversation model requires everyone involved to be present and engaged in building a response in near real time. A conversation is much more demanding than an activity stream and should produce better results. Certainly no one imagines that their Facebook news stream is making progress towards a solution to anything.

Bottom line: existing engagement software and the "activity stream" model go a little ways toward the "humanity engine" concept, but engagement software lacks AI features and "activity streams" aren't focused on problem solutions in near real time.