By Sara Shay

Seth Raphael SM ’07 has made a career out of intertwining magic and technology. He has been a global TED fellow, was the chief magical officer (yes, really) at Bump Technologies, and is now a software architect at Google, where he recently moved from the augmented reality team to a team that he can only reveal is “prototyping the future of work.” In April, he appeared on Penn & Teller: Fool Us, performing a classic mind-reading trick with concealed high-tech underpinnings. (Spoiler: He fooled them.)

As a child, Raphael fell in love with magic after he inherited magic books from his grandfather and tricks that he’d created. A little later, he got into computers, and by the time he was in high school he was combining both interests. “I was programming my computer to basically do what was in the magic books, taking these tricks that I had been performing and putting the computer in the role of the magician,” he says.