WiM Presents: The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism
Saturday 1st June 2024
Women in MICCAI (WiM) is happy to announce the first invited talk in the WiM Webinar Series 2024.
The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism
Thursday, June 20, 2024
3:00pm - 4:00pm UTC / 8:00am - 9:00am PDT / 11:00am - 12:00pm EDT
What is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can feminism work towards it? In this talk, Dr. Kerry McInerney (co-editor of The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism and Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on AI, Algorithms, And Intelligent Machines) explores how feminist theory, scholarship and activism can transform our approach to AI and machine learning. She explores the plurality of feminisms at work in AI, how to thread the needle between technopessimism and techno-optimism, and why AI ethics is always about power.
Registration is free (and required) - here
About the Speaker
Dr Kerry McInerney (née Mackereth) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, where she co-leads the Global Politics of AI project on how AI is impacting international relations. She is also a Research Fellow at the AI Now Institute (a leading AI policy thinktank in New York) and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL for 2023-2024.
Kerry’s work explores the intersections between race, gender, political violence, and artificial intelligence. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Signs, Big Data and Society, New Media and Society, Philosophy and Technology, Public Understanding of Science, Feminist Review, Ethics and Information Technology, Gender, Place and Culture, and the National Political Science Review. Kerry is the co-editor of the collection Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines (2023, Oxford University Press), the collection The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism (2024, Bloomsbury Academic), and the co-author of the forthcoming book Reprogram: Why Big Tech is Broken and How Feminism Can Fix It (2026, Princeton University Press). She is also currently working on two other book projects. The first, tentatively titled Yellow Techno-Peril: Anti-Asian Racism and Artificial Intelligence, examines how anti-Asian racism and the trope of the ‘Yellow Peril’ shape AI geopolitics, narratives and discourse. The second is a trade book focuses on race, technology, and identity.
Kerry is an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker (2023), one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics (2022), one of Computing’s Rising Stars 30 (2023), and she has been shortlisted for the Champion of Women - Champion of Innovation (2022), Women of the Future - Technology and Digital (2022), and Women in Tech Excellence - Rising Star (2022) awards. She co-hosts the Good Robot podcast on feminism, gender and technology, and has appeared on popular shows such as BBC World Service, The Daily Zeitgeist, BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking, The Guilty Feminist, BBC Cambridgeshire, and the Colin McEnroe show. Her work has also been covered worldwide by media outlets like the BBC, BBC Today, Forbes, the Register, The Guardian, the Telegraph, The Daily Mail, BBC Tech Tent, and many other international outlets.