James Williams: Stand Out of Our Light | TEDx

In this video, James Williams covers topics such as social distraction and life. In a reality that's flooded with fake news, identities and false realities, design ethicist James Williams argues that we need to redefine the way we use social media if we want to be more, well, social. Williams is a design ethicist and a co-founder of the Time Well Spent campaign, an effort that aims to evolve the design ethos of digital technologies to help them be more respectful of our time and attention, and more supportive of our deeper human values and goals. He is currently completing doctoral research at the University of Oxford, where he is focused on questions of attention and persuasion in technology design. 

James Williams’ work sits at the intersection of philosophy, ethics, and technology. A research associate at Oxford University, he worked for over 10 years at Google, where he received the Founder’s Award for his work on search advertising. In 2017, he won the inaugural Nine Dots Prize, a major international award for innovative thinking, which led to the publication of his book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. TechCrunch called Stand Out of Our Light “an instant classic in the field of tech ethics”; The Observer hailed it as “a landmark book.” Additionally, the President of Princeton University selected the book as the 2019 ‘pre-read,’ i.e. the one book all incoming Princeton students are assigned to read before beginning their studies.