Seite - 22 - in Coaching im digitalen Wandel

Clutterbuck22 An extension of this technology will be the ability to bring a whole team into a virtual room for team coaching, in a meld of communication technology and virtual reality. Some of the challenges here are still very basic. For example, wearing a heavy VR headset for long periods is tough and will remain so until they weigh roughly the same as a normal pair of audio headphones. Enhancing and supplementing human capabilities: Artificial intelligence in coaching and mentoring The roots of the algorithm as coach, or »intelligent coaching systems« lie in edu- cation, rather than in the wider field of coaching. They are described as »systems that ›look over the shoulder‹ of a student or user and interpret his/her perfor- mance of a cognitive task« (Breuker, 1998). At that stage, there is no indication of a conversation. Yet as I write, IBM has exhibited an AI capable of holding a debate. It is able to call upon a library of 10 billion sentences to respond to the argu- ments of its human debating rival. (The human won, but this is only round one!) Other continuing experiments are building the capacity of algorithms to undertake therapeutic conversations, with the AI proving itself more accurate in diagnosis and marginally better than human therapists at appearing non-judg- mental. The University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technol- ogies’ AI therapist has been designed to work with victims of post-traumatic stress disorder (Gratch, 2014). Ellie, the avatar therapist is designed to be human- like, but clearly not a real person. She listens to clients and observes their facial expressions as they talk, analyses their responses and eases the conversation with nods and other signs of empathy. Laboratory tests show that clients open up more to the avatar than to real human therapists. An AI has several significant advantages and disadvantages compared with a human therapist. Among the advantages are that it: Ȥ registers micro-expressions that are usually too fleeting for a human to notice; Ȥ more accurately observes other minute physical signs of stress; Ȥ continues the conversation while analysing for patterns; Ȥ holds an accurate record of previous sessions; Ȥ does not have to deal with interference from »parallel processing« – where the coaches’ own »stuff« intrudes. A consistent factor behind these and other success stories is an immense invest- ment of time, expertise and financial resources. When we compare this with the worlds of coaching and mentoring, the existing resources are at a much more Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY-NC-ND 4.0