Ted Audio Collective I'm going to share something with you that

I'm not quite sure how to process. Some of the people I've worked with are kind of invisible.

You don't really see them. They operate out of sight and out of mind. They're like ghosts.

And they're what today's speaker Mary Gray calls ghost workers. For instance, if I want

to transcribe a speech, I can just click on a button on a website and voila. A beautifully

clean transcript is delivered by one of the thousands of invisible workers hired by an

online transcription company. And these are on full-time regular employees. They don't

have benefits. They're not chatting at the water cooler with their co-workers. We don't

necessarily see them every day, yet they're changing how the economy works.

We are living through the tech-enabled unraveling of full-time employment itself.

So citizens, governments, consumers, workers, and businesses need to broker a new social

contract and safety net. That's Mary Gray, who you'll hear more from shortly. And

she makes me wonder, what would this new social contract look like and how do we develop

a safety net?

I'm Madu Backanola. This is Ted Business. Today's talk is from Mary Gray, an anthropologist

and senior principal researcher at Microsoft. She focuses on how technology changes the

way we think about labor, identity, and human rights. At the height of the pandemic, when

so many of us were feeling invisible, Mary gave a virtual Ted talk with some big ideas

that will change the way you think about what it means to have a job today.

Throughout her talk, I'll jump in to break down what she shares with us. But first, a quick

break.

Hey, it's Adam Grant, host of the Ted Podcast Work Life. This episode has been brought

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