McCarthy is thinking along similar lines. "It gets even more interesting when you think about a system where you could input the kind of person you want to become, the kind of interactions you want to have, and let the technology guide you there at a base level," she says.

Wearable fitness trackers are meant to be self-discipline prosthetics. They promise that by quantifying ourselves, they will help us become fitter, happier and more productive. Wearables like Fitbit and Nike FuelBand aren't meant to just track what we do, they're meant to encourage us to do it better.

As it turns out, outsourcing your personality can seriously mess you up

As Mat Honan points out at Wired, these are still early days. These wearables could be coaching us, but so far they aren't. They will be soon.

When Jawbone, maker of the UP, purchased big data startup Massive Health, it bought a company intent on using crowdsourcing to (amongst other things) coach people to be better eaters. "Imagine if you could have a personal trainer who knew you and cared about you who could show up for 30 seconds 10 times a day," said then CEO Sutha Kamal last year.

This is wearable computers, the quantified self, and massive data services as tiny homunculus, sitting on your face and whispering advice in your ear. What kind of daemon or angel should they be?

"This kind of thing both terrifies and fascinates me," says McCarthy. "It's all being imagined and developed right now, so I see my role as an artist as pushing on the edges of these technological futures. Creating scenarios that tread a line between something dystopic and something positive, and trying to tease out some of the issues and subtleties in the confrontation."

Social Turkers is an experiment in what happens when you turn over life coaching duties to a crowd of (paid) strangers. "We've seen with open source software development, for example, how communities can come together online and create something beyond what any individual could even fathom," says McCarthy. "What if we applied similar methodology to ourselves and our lives?"

There is a freedom in turning over your decisions to someone else. By outsourcing part of her personality for the duration of the date, McCarthy didn't need to worry about the awkwardness of trying to read a situation and push forwards or hold back. The Turk workers took care of that for her. It was clumsy, but all prototypes are clumsy.

"I didn’t find love, though I was definitely open to it," McCarthy says. "I’m interested in art that blends into reality, so I wanted to let this affect me and my life as much as possible."

The random strangers part of Social Turkers is clearly unworkable. The quality of advice given wasn't that good. Imagine if she could assemble a collection of smart and trusted Turk workers.

The hardware and software parts are all in place with Glass. It already offers livestreaming to and from the device. A well-designed cloud service could handle the rest, matching paying clients to smart advisors, be they human or software agents. The same tech that powered McCarthy's dates could match her up with a board of wise elders instead.

Imagine a system that makes better decisions than we'd be able to make on own. We go to bars with wingmen and women to look out for us. Why not virtual wingmen? We turn to friends and family for advice on big decisions. Shouldn't we plug in to the collective wisdom day to day?