Mary Gray

Activist, Educator/Teacher, Scientist, Writer/Editor

I am the co-author of Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass—named a Financial Times’ Critic’s Pick in 2019. I am a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research as well as a 2019-20 E.J. Safra Center for Ethics Fellow and Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society Faculty Affiliate at Harvard University. I also hold a faculty post in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering with affiliations in Anthropology and Gender Studies at Indiana University. An anthropologist and media scholar by training, I focus on how everyday uses of technologies transform people’s lives. My 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 explored how young people in rural Appalachia use the Internet to craft their identities, local belonging, and connections to broader queer communities. I chair the Microsoft Research Ethics Review Program—the only federally-registered review board of its kind in the tech industry—and am a leading expert in the emerging field of AI and ethics, particularly research at the intersections of computer and social sciences. I sit on the editorial boards of Cultural Anthropology, Television and New Media, the International Journal of Communication, and Social Media + Society and my research has been covered by The Guardian, El Pais, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Nature, The Economist, Harvard Business Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Forbes Magazine. I served on the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association and was the Program Chair for the Association’s 113th Annual Meeting. I currently sit on the California Governor's Council of Economic Advisors, and serve on several boards, including Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIM&R) and Stanford University’s One-Hundred-Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100) Standing Committee, commissioned to reflect on the future of AI and recommend directions for its policy implications.

digital labor; future of work; rural places; digital inequalities; LGBTQ rights

Automating jobs, paradoxically, creates two new streams of work. One stream hires people to help shape the training data needed to develop artificial intelligence. The other stream hires people to step in where AI fails us, bootstrapping automated systems with human judgment that keep humans in the loop yet out of sight of the consumer. Both forms of AI-enhanced work dismantle full-time employment itself, turning jobs that can be sourced, scheduled, managed, shipped, and billed through platforms, application programming interfaces, and the internet into distributed tasks done on-demand anywhere, anytime, by anyone able to get online. Digital economies cannot sustain themselves unless we recognize two fundamental truths of this reorientation to work: 1) consumers and businesses alike now depend on a shared abundance of people. Collectives of individuals, rather than a single firm's employees, deliver moments of human insight integral to these news forms of task-based work and 2) all workers, no matter where they are or the hours they work, need a new social contract to make on-demand work sustainable.

Crowdsourcing, digital economy, Digital Media & Technology, Ethnographic research, LGBT studies, Rural Studies

I've spent seven years studying workers, like the linguists who drive the Open Translation Project (OTP) at TED, to understand the dynamics driving on-demand platform economies and the people participating in them. I'm particularly interested in how we might build a future in which all working people have more opportunities to control their schedules, projects, and networks through on-demand work.

cross-country skiing; fitting things into car trunks; making flaky pie crusts