Tuesday, December 2

Shared Wisdom: A conversation with Sandy Pentland and Cade Metz

  • Book Talk
  • Hybrid

On December 2, 2025, the Lab hosted 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 was moderated by New York Times reporter Cade Metz.

 

Order Shared Wisdom
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.

Sandy Pentland

HAI Fellow and Lead Faculty

Alex “Sandy” Pentland is HAI Center Fellow and faculty lead for digital society at Stanford HAI and Digital Economy Lab. He is Toshiba Professor at MIT, member of US National Academies, Advisor to Abu Dhabi Investment Authority Lab, and formerly advisory board member at UN Secretary General’s office, Google, ATT, Telefonica, and elsewhere. Spin-off companies and open source systems from his lab manage authentication of most digital transactions in the world, media for roughly 1B people in far east, and health resources for roughly 0.5B people in the indopacific. His current focus is on problems and opportunities in using AI to improve our social institutions.

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Cade Metz

New York Times Reporter

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.