You and Betty and the Nancy's and Bill's and Joes and Jane's will find in the study of science

a richer, more rewarding life.

Welcome to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indra Viscontas. This is a podcast that explores the space

where science and society collide. We want to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it matters.

As we start the new year, I wanted to talk about the future in a way that is actually a lot more hopeful than we hear in the news today.

You probably know that I've been really interested in exploring how technology is shaping our thoughts and our behaviors.

I recently finished shooting a 24 lecture series for the great courses.

It's going to come out some time this year.

And in the course of my research, I came across a book that I

found really interesting and that was written in a very different voice from a lot of the other

books I had read. It's called Beyond the Valley, How Innovators around the World are

overcoming inequality and creating the technologies of tomorrow by Ramish Srinivasa. Ramish is a professor

of information studies and design media arts at UCLA.

And he's talked a lot about technology and a lot of other media outlets.

But what makes him different from most of the other journalists that I speak to,

and so far I don't even know if he necessarily would refer to himself as a journalist.

But the fact is, he did investigative reporting in parts of the world that generally are not covered by people who are interested in technology.

He doesn't mean just beyond the valley, like let's go, you know, somewhat outside of Silicon Valley.

He means in places like Africa, which are often ignored,

and he talks about ways in which people in very far off forgotten places are actually

serving as role models for what you and I might do in terms of improving our relationship

with technology.

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