Mary L. Gray is Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and Faculty Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She maintains a faculty position in the Luddy 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 people’s everyday uses of technologies transform labor, identity, and human rights. Mary earned her PhD in Communication from the University of California at San Diego in 2004, under the direction of Susan Leigh Star. In 2020, Mary was named a MacArthur Fellow for her contributions to anthropology and the study of technology, digital economies, and society.

Mary’s work includes In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth (1999) and Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (2009), which looked at how young people in rural Southeast Appalachia use media to negotiate identity, local belonging, and connections to broader, imagined queer communities. The book won the American Anthropological Association’s Ruth Benedict Prize and the American Sociological Association’s Sexualities Studies Book Award in 2009. And, with Colin Johnson and Brian Gilley, Mary co-edited Queering the Countryside: New Directions in Rural Queer Studies (2016), a 2016 Choice Academic Title.

In 2019, Mary co-authored (with computer scientist Siddharth Suri), Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass. The book chronicles workers’ experiences of on-demand information service jobs—from content moderation and data-labeling to telehealth—work that is essential to the global growth of artificial intelligence and platform economies more broadly. It was named a Financial Times’ Critic’s Pick and awarded the McGannon Center for Communication Research Book Prize in 2019. The book was also awarded the 2020 Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS) Book Award Honorable Mention. The book has been translated into Korean and Chinese.

Mary chairs the Microsoft Research Ethics Review Program—the only federally-registered institutional review board of its kind in tech. She is recognized as a leading expert in the emerging field of AI and ethics, particularly research at the intersections of computer and social sciences. She sits on the editorial boards of Cultural Anthropology, Television and New Media, the International Journal of Communication, and Social Media + Society. Mary’s research has been covered by popular press venues, including 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. She served on the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association and was the Association’s Section Assembly Convenor from 2006-2010 as well as the co-chair of the Association’s 113th Annual Meeting.

Mary currently sits on several boards, including the California Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors, 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.

Topics:

  • Hidden beneath the surface of the web, lost in our wrong-headed debates about AI, a new menace is looming. Based on her book of the same name, Mary Gray’s deep research offers a necessary and revelatory exposé of the invisible human workforce that powers the web—and that foreshadows the true future of work. This talk unveils how services delivered by tech and information service companies, like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber, can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast, invisible human labor force. These people doing “ghost work” make the internet seem smart. They perform high-tech piecework: flagging X-rated content, proofreading, designing engine parts, and much more. There are no labor laws to govern this kind of work, and these latter-day assembly lines draw in—and all too often overwork and underpay—a surprisingly diverse range of workers: harried young mothers, professionals forced into early retirement, recent grads who can’t get a toehold on the traditional employment ladder, and minorities shut out of the jobs they want. Mary shows how workers, employers, and society at large can ensure that this new kind of work creates opportunity—rather than misery—for those who do it.

  • As social media and other tech companies face serious ethical criticism—about privacy, algorithmic bias, emotional manipulation, and other concerns—this talk offers a new "human data research" paradigm for technology's next wave of social worlds. Most of these "ethical dilemmas" arise not because bad-intentioned actors, but because methods of investigation and innovation are pushed to capacity and failing us. For instance, traditional principles of human subject research aren't suited for online environments today, which are at once familiar software (like a spreadsheet), but also controlled settings (like a lab) and deeply social and dynamic (like a backyard BBQ). The path forward isn't in listing an abstract set of principles but hammering out a new, shared course of action that seeks to respect the rights/freedoms of individuals and society in these new online environments. Researchers and industry need to earn the public's trust in order to protect their own future as investigators of the human experience.

  • In this talk based on her research and books on queer culture, Mary L. Gray provides a fascinating and often surprising look at the contours of gay life beyond the big city. She illustrates that, against a backdrop of an increasingly impoverished and privatized rural America, LGBT youth and their allies visibly and often vibrantly work the boundaries of the public spaces available to them, whether in their high schools, public libraries, town hall meetings, churches, or through websites. This important research shows that rural LGBT youth explore and carve out online spaces to fashion their emerging queer identities. Their triumphs and travails defy clear distinctions often drawn between online and offline experiences of identity, fundamentally redefining our understanding of the term queer visibility’ and its political stakes. Mary combines ethnographic insight with incisive cultural critique, engaging with some of the biggest issues facing both queer studies and media scholarship.

Twitter: @marylgray

As automation becomes more prevalent, many worry that the digital age is crowding out humans. In Ghost Work, anthropologist Mary L. Gray, a Harvard Fellow an...