Skip to Content

Digital Summit: Being Human in the Future

Intel’s chief anthropologist frames the MIT Technology Review Digital Summit by talking about the values that change, and those that don’t, as technology progresses.

Even as the Internet of things, new interfaces, online health services, and other technological trends develop remarkably quickly, technology companies often forget that the users of these services change relatively slowly. With that observation, Genevieve Bell, the anthropologist who leads user-experience research at Intel, opened the MIT Technology Review Digital Summit today in San Francisco.

Bell told editor in chief Jason Pontin that a better appreciation of fundamental human desires–we all want to be part of a community that shares our values, for instance, and “we like to keep secrets and tell lies”–would make technologists less breathless and more honest about the potential for “smart cities,” connected cars, and other ideas that will be aired at the summit.

Here’s hoping that Bell’s way of framing technological change remains in the air throughout the summit today and tomorrow. My colleagues and I will be posting updates.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.

ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like.

New large language models will transform many jobs. Whether they will lead to widespread prosperity or not is up to us.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.