#91 Researching the Social Impacts of Technology and Artificial Intelligence with Mary L. Gray – Senior Principal Researcher, Author, and Professor
Mary L. Gray is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research as well as an E.J. Safra Center for Ethics Fellow and Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society Faculty Affiliate at Harvard University. Mary also maintains a faculty position in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering with affiliations in Anthropology and Gender Studies at Indiana University. Mary, an anthropologist and media scholar by training, focuses on how everyday uses of technologies transform people’s lives.
Mary is the author, with computer scientist Siddharth Suri, of Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2019. It was named a Financial Times’ Critic’s Pick and awarded the McGannon Center for Communication Research Book Prize in 2019. The book has been translated into Korean and Chinese.
In this episode, Mary opens the show talking about researching for Microsoft – she said it’s exciting to work at a place that is not looking for any immediate answers. Science is necessary for society to progress the world and ourselves continually. Building technology means we are interacting with the community. Researchers are trained to look at the big picture and find out how technology will affect people’s everyday lives. Plus, scholars need to be in the mix when looking at the future of technology. Mary thought she would always have to make a strong case for the environment. However, there is a rise of awareness with younger computer engineers that are more conscious of social and environmental causes. Engineers know that there are social dynamics that not everyone is trained to see or understand.
When you are in a small town, being familiar is the most valuable currency you have. The other most crucial currency is job opportunities. Mary’s work is meant to think about the questions of the political, economic impact of technology. How do our social selves show up at work? There are consequences of being able to strip away the work environment. People are resistant to the way technology is ripping apart their social connections. Mary’s research focuses on young people that don’t leave their rural communities. Everything we know about rural gay life is from the people who left their rural communities. How do you navigate being continuously told that where you live is crappy and that you should leave? When we go online, we reproduce the social relationships that we have in our everyday lives. The idea that people are trying to get away when they are online doesn’t come from the rural community.
Mary also learned how people could collectively organize and be in solidarity. For example, young people come out as transgender and share how to go about their transition on the internet. They are learning how to become who they are concerning somebody else’s experiences. We can continuously change if we are continually interacting with each other. Mary would track the language that people use and notice how they correct each other in different ways. Qualitatively, you can understand change over time – it’s more difficult for data scientists to do this. Technology allows for visibility with people’s interactions. Most of the questions Mary asks are about how technology makes us more seen, yet also how technology makes us less seen. Stay tuned as Mary talks about how AI is affecting people’s work lives, automation in specialized fields, and how AI is evolving in different countries.
Enjoy the show!
We speak about:
[00:30] About Mary L. Gray
[04:25] What’s it like in the Microsoft Research Center?
[06:25] What surprised you the most about researching with Microsoft?
[08:40] Is your work focused mostly in the United States?
[10:10] Is your previous work focused on the social side of technology?
[14:40] What other interesting viewpoints did you learn during your research?
[24:00] How are people’s work lives being shaped by AI?
[35:30] How is automation going to affect the execution of algorithms in specialized fields?
[42:40] How do you see AI evolving in different countries?
Resources:
Mary’s Website: https://marylgray.org
Mary’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/marylgray
Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass
In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth, Queering the Countryside: New Directions in Rural Queer Studies
Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America
Quotes:
“I love studying gender and sexuality because it is so intimate.”
“If we are constantly interacting with each other, we can constantly transform into different senses of who we are.”
“When you introduce new technologies, it is shaping conversations.”
“The work of data science is a global project.”
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