Intersections: Technology and Culture

Craig Lambert is the author of Mind Over Water: Lessons on Life from the Art of Rowing. He is a former staff writer and editor at Harvard Magazine and has also written for Sports Illustrated and Town & Country. He graduated from Harvard College and received his Ph.D. in sociology, also from Harvard, in 1978. His latest book Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day (Counterpoint) examines a profound transformation in the nature of work that is significantly altering lives: the incoming tidal wave of shadow work. Shadow work includes all the unpaid tasks we do on behalf of businesses and organizations. It has slipped into our routines stealthily; most of us do not realize how much of it we are already doing, even as we pump our own gas, scan and bag our own groceries, execute our own stock trades, and build our own unassembled furniture. But its presence is unmistakable, and its effects far-reaching. Shadow Work offers a field guide to this new phenomenon. It shines a light on these trends now so prevalent in our daily lives and, more importantly, offers valuable insight into how to counter their effects.

Kentaro Toyama is W. K. Kellogg Associate Professor at University of Michigan's School of Information and a fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. Until 2009, he was assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded in 2005.  He is also co-editor-in-chief of the journal Information Technologies and International Development. His latest book is Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology (Public Affair). In this incisive book, Toyama cures us of the manic rhetoric of digital utopians and reinvigorates us with a deeply people-centric view of social change. Contrasting the outlandish claims of tech zealots with stories of people like Patrick Awuah, a Microsoft millionaire who left his engineering job to open Ghana’s first liberal arts university, and Tara Sreenivasa, a graduate of a remarkable South Indian school that takes impoverished children into the high-tech offices of Goldman Sachs and Mercedes-Benz, Geek Heresy is a heartwarming reminder that it’s human wisdom, not machines, that move our world forward.

Martin Ford, the founder of a Silicon Valley–based software development firm, has over twenty-five years of experience in computer design and software development. He is the author of The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology, and the Economy of the Future. In Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (Basic Books) Ford warns of a future in which good jobs might become obsolete. He details what machine intelligence and robotics can accomplish, and implores employers, scholars, and policy makers alike to face the implications. The past solutions to technological disruption, especially more training and education, aren’t going to work, and we must decide, now, he argues, whether the future will see broad-based prosperity or catastrophic levels of inequality and economic insecurity.