Tech's next responsibility: Building for emotional durability, not just efficiency

International Women's Day often celebrates women in leadership, innovation, and enterprise. I want to name a different frontier that sits in plain sight: the work of preserving family memory, and the fact that technology has largely ignored it.

In many Asian households, women carry what I call the Third Shift: the cognitive labour of legacy-keeping. They hold the details that keep a family coherent, the stories behind the photos, the context behind the choices, the values behind the milestones, sometimes even a legacy as simple as a family favourite recipe passed down through generations. It is leadership work. It is unpaid. It is time-consuming. It is becoming harder, precisely as families become more global.

The Third Shift: the work tech hasn't designed for

We have built world-class tools for productivity, logistics, and speed but far fewer tools for continuity.

The Third Shift is not sentimental. It is infrastructure. When stories are not preserved, families lose more than memories. They lose meaning: how people made decisions, what they endured, what shaped them, what they believed. Over time, the next generation inherits fragments without context, and distance follows

Singapore has physical infrastructure; families need emotional infrastructure

Singapore is a clear example of why this matters. It is multicultural, expatriate-heavy, and intensely mobile. Many families are spread across time zones: parents in India, siblings in Australia, friends in the UK, children growing up in Singapore, everyone trying to stay connected across distance and time. For me, this is not an abstract idea. It is the reality of relationships lived across borders.

In families like these, "keeping in touch" becomes a stream of logistics and updates. The deeper material, the stories, values, memories that carry a voice, erodes quietly. We have world-class systems for transport, commerce, and connectivity. We are still building the emotional infrastructure that helps families stay rooted.

Photos capture moments. Stories preserve people.

Most families already have an archive: thousands of images across phones and cloud drives. The gap is not storage. The gap is narrative.

A photo shows what happened. A story holds why it mattered: the fear behind a brave decision, the humour inside an ordinary day, the grief someone hid to protect others, the pride they never voiced. Without narrative, families lose context, and context is what turns information into identity.

This is why the line lands so sharply in Asian households: we are losing stories faster than we can preserve them.

The next wave of tech: from efficiency to emotional durability

Over the last two decades, I spent 17.5 years at Google, and I currently work at Adobe. In that time, I have watched the technology industry become exceptional at efficiency. We build tools to reduce friction, speed up workflows, and make distance feel irrelevant. We have designed brilliantly for mobility.

What we have under-invested in is what keeps people rooted: memory, identity, continuity, and voice. That is why I believe the next frontier of innovation is emotional durability: tools that help relationships and meaning endure over time.

Build for the grandmother who doesn't think she is "a writer"

Story preservation fails most often at the starting line. People face the blank page and freeze. They do not know what to write, what to include, or how to structure a life into something coherent. They worry about language, grammar, and whether their memories "sound good enough" to keep.

Think of a grandmother who never finished school, or someone who has carried a family through hardship and still feels her words are not "polished" enough to be preserved. The right tools can help her begin anyway.

This is where technology can serve something deeply human:

• Voice-to-text that lets people speak instead of type.
• Structured prompts that replace intimidation with a gentle starting point.
• Transcripts and editorial support that shape a lifetime into something readable and respectful.
• AI used as an organising and clarity tool, while authorship stays firmly with the storyteller.

By lowering the barrier to entry, we do more than just simplify a task. We democratize legacy. We ensure that those who have historically been excluded from storytelling, because they didn't think they had the right words or pedigree, finally have a seat at the table of family history.

The ethics of memory: ownership, consent, restraint

Applying technology to family narrative carries real risk. Stories involve other people. They include sensitive histories, medical conditions, and chapters someone may later regret sharing.

Any serious approach needs non-negotiables:

• The storyteller must remain the owner of the narrative, with control over what stays in and what is removed.
• Sensitive sections must be handled with care and revised only with explicit consent.
• Human judgement matters for emotional nuance and safeguarding dignity.
• Privacy is not a feature; it is a foundation, especially when stories cross geographies and jurisdictions.

The strongest "tech-to-heart" products will be designed with restraint: tools that support reflection, protect agency, and preserve voice without turning memory into content.

Why International Women's Day is the right moment for this conversation

International Women's Day is a useful moment to name the Third Shift as real labour, and to ask why technology has not supported it.

The Third Shift has existed for generations. What has changed is the environment: families are more global, time is scarcer, cultural transmission is under pressure. The labour of remembering did not disappear. It became harder, and more urgent.

If the technology sector wants to claim it is building for real life, it needs a broader definition of value. Efficiency is table stakes. Emotional durability is the next frontier.

In a region as mobile as Asia, preserving stories is one of the most practical ways families hold onto identity, connection, and meaning. It is time we treated this work, so often carried by women, as a serious design problem and opportunity for innovation.