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Steven Levy
Wired’s Editor at Large
Steven Levy
Wired’s Editor at Large
Biography
For over four decades Levy has chronicled the digital revolution, its impact on humanity, and the people behind it. He has written the foundational work on computer culture (Hackers, 1984) and with Crypto (2001) the indispensable book on the story behind that groundbreaking technology—years before people began gushing about Bitcoin and the blockchain. He has written the definitive books on Facebook, Google, the Macintosh, and the iPod. World-class engineers tell him that they pursued AI after reading his 1992 book Artificial Life. And he currently covers the breadth of tech stories — the good and the disturbing — for WIRED, where he has been a contributor since its inception. He is a leading chronicler of the current AI boom, covering all the major companies and breaking news of promising startups. The Washington Post has described him as "America's premier technology journalist."
Levy’s previous positions include founder of Backchannel and chief technology writer and senior editor for Newsweek. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper’s Magazine, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Premiere. Among his honors: PC Magazine named Hackers the best sci-tech book written in the last twenty years. Crypto won the grand e-book prize at the 2001 Frankfurt Book Fair. In the Plex was Amazon’s best business book of 2011. In 2008 he was inducted as a SVForum Visionary, alongside Reed Hastings and Diane Greene. (Previous winners include Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, and Vin Cerf.) He has won several Computer Press Association Awards, been finalist for the National Magazine Award and the Loeb Award, winner of a Clarion Award and many others. His 1988 book, The Unicorn’s Secret, was the source material for a two-night NBC miniseries, The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer.
Levy hails from Philadelphia, where he began his career writing for weekly papers and writing stories for Philadelphia Magazine and the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine. He wrote extensively on rock music and sports. In 1982, he published a Rolling Stone story on computer hackers that drew him into the world of technology. He lives in New York City with his wife, Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Teresa Carpenter.
Speaker Videos
Inside the Mind of Google
Speech Topics
Hackernomics
30 years ago, Levy’s book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution described the "hacker ethic" which has lead the huge innovations and success of technology companies. Three decades later, Steven has revisited the hacker world, and has found that the “hacker ethic” is now the dominating culture in the most of the world’s most admired companies (Facebook even named the road leading into their corporate campus “Hacker Way”). Learn why the hacker mindset drives the type of innovation that makes companies like Apple, Google, Facebook and others so successful. More importantly, he explores the key hacker concepts and practices that you can immediately use to drive higher levels of innovation in your organization. This is a critical speech for leaders looking to gain an edge over their competitors.
The Birth of Our Intelligent Future
Big Data, Smart Sensors, Artificial Intelligence and Hyper-connectivity have spawned the birth of a more Intelligent Future. From self-driving cars to Healthcare AI diagnostic systems, from smart energy grids to drones, Levy takes you thru the exponential growth of a world where systems will not only automate many of our mundane human tasks, but think and anticipate our more complicated needs and help us negotiate an ever increasingly complex world. Explore how to take advantage of this new future.
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works & Shapes Our Lives
Security, Privacy & Technology
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