You know we sometimes, I think, forget that we're all human.
And when something so dramatic happens,
it makes us remember that at the end of the day,
these small things don't matter.
The thing that really matters
is did you help somebody or did you not?
Times of crisis push us to innovate,
to adapt, and evolve.
To truly come together, we must break down barriers
and nurture alternate perspectives.
Science and technology offer the opportunity
to fuel discovery and magnify our ingenuity.
These are some of the stories and people
whose ideas are carrying us forward
to emerge resilient.
[RESILIENCE]
[Episode 2 Rethinking Our Shared Experiences]
So it was literally,
probably overnight that we went from, "Is this real?"
to "Oh, my God!
This is real, and it's way worse."
I remember, I sent an email to my team say,
"Hey, I think we should work from home from now on
until this is clear,"
because just the tip of the iceberg.
I am an optimist.
I don't know if I've ever had my optimism shaken so hard,
to be honest.
Early on in the pandemic,
it became clear that COVID
was going to be a battle fought on multiple fronts.
We first needed to understand the virus
and how it was spreading.
But we also understood as a result of the increasing
disruption to our lives
that they were going to be inherent societal consequences.
It's a respiratory issue. It's a respiratory crisis.
But yeah, I think the psychological aftermath
will also be quite something.
And that has a social cost.
But I felt like I had to learn, I have to get educated,
I felt like I was in the privileged position
to do something.
So we asked ourselves,
without any solutions in front of us,
how do we take action to fight the virus
and how do we begin to understand
the impact of the pandemic on a personal
and on a community level?
It became clear that something was happening
that made my expertise really, really relevant
in a way it had not been before.
And then immediately, of course,
your engineering mind goes to,
"Okay, how can we fix this? How can we help?"
[Investigating the impact of remote work]
I tend to think about
how do people understand communication technologies,
how do they incorporate them into their lives,
what are the consequences of that,
and that interplay back and forth
where technologies are helping define
who we are and how we live,
and the way that we understand technologies
is helping define what those technologies become
and how they develop.
You know, we're unique but we're absolutely
this entwined web of ways of being in the world.
So most of what we have to learn is how to study relationships.
I think that everything that happened last year
is very hard to understand, in terms of technology, people,
relationship, because we were all traumatized
and living through a completely surreal experience
losing our sense of what is reality.
Like the lesson of the social sciences is you can interject
one thing, time, and it changes everything.
The purpose of the Work Trend Index
is to take the pulse of the global workforce
and understand how is modern work changing worldwide.
There was a survey of about 300,000 workers
in 19 different countries trying to understand
their experience of this change.
People report more meetings, more hours at work,
more messaging.
They report more messages after hours
and telemetric show that there is more messages after hours.
So there's just this continuous, staring at screens,
typing into screens, reading on screens,
listening to screens, being with screens.
In a hybrid environment,
the danger is the lot of social capital
is built through informal
and spontaneous sorts of interaction.
If you're not in the room,
you're part of all the scheduled conversations
but you're not part of any of the befores
and you're not part of any of the afters.
And a lot of the occasions when those work relations
develop a bit of a flavor of care for one another
are harder for you to access.
We keep talking about, you know,
we're talking about the new future of work.
We're saying, "We don't want to go back to normal.
We want to build a better future.
We want a new better work."
Everything in our lives,
how we work, play and learn had to change overnight.
We are naturally social beings
and so even the idea of social distancing
comes with an inherent cost.
The other thing about people at home working all the time,
especially if they're living alone,
is that's kind of a lonesome place to be,
struggling to feel connected with their jobs,
struggling to fit into their organizations
if they've been hired recently,
feeling much more dissatisfied in general.
So every time, everybody's like,
"Well, you know, we're working from home is like this."
I'm like, "Are we talking about
working from home or are we talking about
working from home during a pandemic?"
Because they're completely different matters.
We had that privilege to be able to sit in our homes,
while people who didn't have that same privilege
risked their lives.
I mean, there was frontline workers across the board.
We oftentimes just think of medical workers,
but what about the people working in the grocery stores,
what about the people who are delivering our packages?
I mean, these are frontline workers who kept society going.
There's often this incredible amount of pressure
for them to provide.
And then once they've met that demand,
we forget about them.
We're going to have to come up with economic models
that value not just that one person who steps up,
but many people being available at that moment.
How do we make it through this, you know,
the people who kept caring for others?
That's how we made it through.
[Connecting people across communities to save lives]
We were searching for any cure,
for anything that could help and nothing was on the horizon.
So here comes this 100-year-old therapy,
and we had used in Spanish flu pandemic, right?
Multiple organizations came together
to initially leverage convalescent plasma
for potential treatment for COVID.
What I've seen in terms of people connecting with each other
because of the disease has been extremely powerful,
especially when they were able to save or help another person
and save their life.
And there were, of course,
cases where people were recovering
if they got plasma at the right time
in the right dosage.
But to learn that those precise conditions,
you have to go through very rigorous medical studies,
and we had limited amount of time.
And the studies were conducted under different circumstances.
So the data was coming in from all different areas
and scientists were sitting literally
in the room together discussing,
what does that actually mean.
They actually invited these community leaders
to participate in the very same forum
with doctors, with scientists,
with medical institutions.
It was helpful for these therapies,
but it was also helpful for other therapies
that were emerging because the same scientists
were working on a lot of the same things, right?
And now they were talking, they were discussing,
they were connecting, now you have 2 heads, 10 heads,
20 heads better than 1.
So it was completely unprecedented in terms of
how survivors and community leaders
connected directly with those who are making medicine,
who were making vaccines,
who were treating them and helping them understand
what is happening out there on the ground.
[Building with communities to create equitable solutions]
The stark statistics on who was dying versus who was living,
based on socioeconomic situation,
that will frame a long-term and powerful discussion
about our society and disparity.
Three times the number of people of color
were killed by the virus
then represents their demographic
in our population in the United States.
That should make no sense.
There's not a biological reason that happened.
Problem is that this pandemic has exposed so many disparities.
We have to create a more equitable world going forward.
I just don't see any way that it stands the way it is.
I came here mostly because I could see
that the people who wanted to build
out the social sciences, understood, at least,
in some sense that computer science engineering
was increasingly in the thick of social questions.
March 5th, this doctor who was involved
in Greenlight Ready texted me and he said,
"I think we have a workflow problem
for taking care of marginalized groups experiencing COVID."
His thought was if you equip communities, in fact,
they're going to be able to care for each other more effectively.
You need to model how people coordinated to see
what kinds of resources were people asking for,
that are then proxies for how sick are they.
And from that, be able to hold these events
where people can get relief.
Now we're doing vaccine expos
with mostly black and brown communities,
Latinx communities, particularly,
undocumented workers who do not want to go
to any public hospital.
That means they can
go to community organizations familiar to them,
and in a confidential way,
seek help with people they trust.
Having hubs, having strong spokes,
that are anchors,
and are going to bring the domain expertise of communities
to the conversation.
It's not a top down.
I'm going to inform people what they should know.
It's going to be this amazing opportunity to say,
"Oh, I'm not the subject matter expert
in what's going on in this setting."
What do you know that I don't know
so that I can advance the state-of-the-art.
Greenlight Ready has gotten doses of vaccine
in the arms of people who, otherwise,
never would have walked into a public hospital.
That's huge.
This effort is, what does it look like
to build a toolkit for the rest of the world
to be able to manage their health.
Our power is to change the world through science.
But our responsibility is to
understand and empathize,
envision the world that we actually want to be a part of.
Technologies are always opening up.
There's possibility of connecting us
whether it's for work or for understanding each other.
And at the same time, it's necessary, not sufficient.
When we think that technologies are going to offer the solutions,
and therefore, we don't have to worry about the social part,
it allows us to not really confront those problems.
The pandemic perhaps made it a little bit easier
for people to see they needed to if they were building something,
tune into who they were building it for and why.
Was it some intuition about what somebody else needed?
Or did they ask?
Did they listen?
The pandemic has created space for critical conversations.
A truly equitable approach to a healthier society
will mean more than just reinforcing our health systems.
It will start with our social systems, our communities.
Now it's about finding the balance
between preserving and reimagining our social fabric
as we work to reopen.
I want to look back at this moment and say,
"This is when we started building out public health care
from the ground up," that we literally said,
"Oh, communities, that's where care happens."
I think that, for me, a big silver lining of this
has been people came through for each other,
they started mutual aid networks.
They cared for one another, workers covered for each other,
we gave each other grace.
And I just hope that we can continue to do that going forward.
And as humans, we just think about a lifetime.
Often time, we have to think about a couple of years,
maybe a decade.
But, you know, there's a beautiful proverb,
"We don't inherit the earth from our parents,
we borrow it from our children."
So that is our responsibility at the end of the day.
This is our wake up call.
This is literally our chance to say,
"Okay, 21st century, how do we want to do this?"
[RESILIENCE]
[Microsoft]