On December 2, 2025, the Lab is thrilled to host a conversation with Sandy Pentland, Stanford Digital Economy Lab Faculty Lead and Stanford HAI Center Fellow, about his new book, Shared Wisdom: Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI.
The event will be moderated by New York Times reporter Cade Metz.
How to build a flourishing society by using what we know about human nature to design our technology—rather than let technology shape our society.
In Shared Wisdom, Alex Pentland delves into the history of innovation, emphasizing the importance of understanding how technologies and cultural inventions impact human society. Humanity’s great leaps forward—the rise of civilizations, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution—were all propelled by cultural inventions that accelerated our rate of innovation and built collective wisdom. Solving current global challenges such as climate change, pandemics, and failing social institutions will require similarly fundamental inventions.
Shared Wisdom provides a unique perspective on human society and offers insights into how we can use technologies like digital media and AI to aid, rather than replace, our human capacity for deliberation. Drawing on his expertise in both social science and technology, the author bridges the gap between these two disciplines and offers a holistic view of the challenges and opportunities we face in the age of AI. By looking deep into our history, Pentland argues that the better we understand the key factors that accelerate cultural evolution, the greater our chances of surmounting our current problems.
Professor Alex `Sandy’ Pentland is Center Fellow at Stanford HAI and Faculty Lead for Digital Platforms and Society Research at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. He previously helped create and direct the MIT Connection Science, the Media Lab and the Media Lab Asia in India.
In 2012 Forbes named Sandy one of the `seven most powerful data scientists in the world’, along with Google founders and the CTO of the United States, and in 2013 he won the McKinsey Award from Harvard Business Review. He is among the most-cited computational scientists in the world, and a pioneer in computational social science, organizational engineering, wearable computing (Google Glass), image understanding, and modern biometrics. His research has been featured in Nature, Science, and Harvard Business Review, as well as being the focus of TV features on BBC World, Discover and Science channels. His most recent book is `Honest Signals,’ published by MIT Press.
Over the years Sandy has advised more than 50 PhD students. Almost half are now tenured faculty at leading institutions, with another one-quarter leading industry research groups and a final quarter founders of their own companies.
Sandy’s research group and entrepreneurship program have spun off more than 30 companies to date, three of which are publicly listed and several that serve millions of poor in Africa and South Asia. Recent spin-offs have been featured in publications such as the Economist and the New York Times, as well as winning a variety of prizes from international development organizations.
Cade Metz is a technology reporter for The New York Times and the author of “Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and The World,” the story of the people, ideas and companies behind the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. At the Times, he covers artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas.
