New Speaker Mary L. Gray Explores How Everyday Technology & AI Transforms Us

If 2020 taught us anything, it is that the way we use technology in our daily lives undeniably matters—to our social life, our economy, our psyche and more.

In 2020, we saw that the way we engage and/or disengage technology on an everyday basis has the potential to encourage new policy-making, such as the introduction of higher minimum-wages for essential workers and the criminalization of no-knock warrants and police chokeholds; the potential to close longstanding businesses; and the potential to validate the humanity of those who have been historically dehumanized. This is no news to new Outspoken speaker, anthropologist and media scholar, Mary L. Gray. As a leading expert in the emerging field of AI and ethics, she has long researched how people’s everyday use of technologies (including artificial intelligence) transform labor, identity and human rights—for better and worse.

In response to COVID-19, in a new socially-distanced society, arguably, all of us had to engage technology in new ways. Many businesses found themselves adopting new social media platforms like Instagram Live to attract consumers virtually. Additionally, while isolated to our homes, many of us found ourselves ordering more essential goods from service-on-demand companies like Amazon, UberEats and more. While the impacts of COVID-19 likely encouraged us to reflect on how our newly-adopted behaviors impacted those people behind the scenes—those who kindly prepared our food or brought our packages to our door—perhaps we largely forgot how our behaviors affected the essential workers who managed our technologies. Mary believes it is in society’s best interest to help all people, especially those AI-enabled service workers, thrive in changing, technological landscapes. “The marketplace alone can’t make the future of AI-enabled service work equitable or sustainable,” Gray says. “That’s up to us.”

Her co-authored book, Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass, a Financial Times’ Critics Pick in 2019, investigates the ways we are safeguarding and harming the vast human labor force that manages the AI-enabled services we use from companies like Amazon, Google, Uber and more. If we hope in 2021 to protect the essential workers of tech from oppressive work conditions, this book is a must-read.

Her other books include In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth, Queering the Countryside: New Directions in Rural Queer Studies and Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America, which explore how young people in rural Appalachia use the internet to craft their identities and build connections to both local and distant queer communities.

A recently named 2020 MacArthur Fellow, Gray chairs the Microsoft Research Ethics Review Program—the only federally-registered institutional review board of its kind in Tech. She is now available to book for virtual events and speaking engagements in 2021.