Is Smart Technology Making Us Dumb?

John Donvan (Host and Moderator): The moderator of Intelligence Squared U.S. debates since 2008, John Donvan is an author and correspondent for ABC News. He has served as ABC’s White House Correspondent, along with postings in Moscow, London, Jerusalem, and Amman. John is the coauthor of In a Different Key: The Story of Autism (Crown, 2016). In addition to premiering his first one-man show, “Lose the Kid,” in 2013 in Washington, D.C., John is a four-time Emmy Award winner and was a National Magazine Award finalist in 2010.

Andrew Keen, named as one of the "100 Most Connected Men" by GQ magazine, is amongst the world's best-known commentators on the digital revolution. He directed and wrote the documentary “How To Fix Democracy” and is the host of the popular podcast "Keen On Capitalism.” He has written five books, including the bestselling "How To Fix The Future," and his most recent book, "Tomorrows Versus Yesterdays: Conversations in Defense of the Future."

David Weinberger (Against the Motion) is a senior researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, where he previously served as co-director of the Library Innovation Lab and led its Interoperability Initiative. He is currently a fellow at the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy. His most recent book, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room (2014), won two international Best Book of the Year awards. He has been published by Wired, Harvard Business Review, Scientific American, New York Times, and elsewhere. Additionally, Weinberger advised three U.S. presidential campaigns on Internet issues and was a Franklin Fellow at the U.S. State Department. Called a "marketing guru" by the Wall Street Journal, he was previously a high-tech marketing VP and strategic marketing consultant, a dot-com entrepreneur, and now serves on the advisory boards of several tech companies.

Genevieve Bell (Against the Motion) is an Intel Fellow and vice president of the Corporate Strategy Office at Intel Corporation. She leads a team of social scientists, interaction designers, human factors engineers and computer scientists focused on people's needs and desires to help shape new Intel products and technologies. An accomplished anthropologist, researcher, and author, she has been granted a number of patents for consumer electronics innovations. Bell is a highly regarded industry expert and frequent commentator on the intersection of culture and technology, featured in Wired, Forbes, Atlantic, Wall Street Journal and New York Times. She was recognized as one of the "100 Most Creative People in Business" by Fast Company, inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, and honored as the 2013 Woman of Vision for Leadership by the Anita Borg Institute. With Paul Dourish, she authored Divining a Digital Future (2011).

Nicholas Carr (For the Motion) writes about technology and culture. He is the author of the acclaimed new book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (2014), which examines the personal and social consequences of our ever growing dependency on computers. His previous work, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2011), was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a New York Times bestseller. A former columnist for the Guardian, Carr writes the popular blog Rough Type and has written for The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Wired, Nature, MIT Technology Review, and other periodicals. His essays, including "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" and "The Great Forgetting," have been collected in several anthologies. Previously, Carr was executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, as well as a member of the Encyclopedia Britannica's editorial board of advisors and the steering board of the World Economic Forum's cloud computing project.