IAS Book Launch: The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism

Dr Kerry McInerney (née Mackereth)

Research Fellow at Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge

Kerry 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. 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 of the Good Robot podcast on feminism, gender and technology, and has appeared on popular shows such as BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking, The Guilty Feminist, BBC Cambridgeshire, the Colin McEnroe show, and the Radical AI Podcast. Her work has also been covered worldwide by media outlets like the BBC, BBC Today, Forbes, the Register, and the Daily Mail, The Guardian, the Telegraph, The Daily Mail, BBC Tech Tent, and many other international outlets. Kerry is also the co-editor of the collection Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines, the forthcoming collection The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism, and the forthcoming book Reprogram: Why Big Tech is Broken and How Feminism Can Fix It (with Dr Eleanor Drage).  

Dr Eleanor Drage

Senior Research Fellow at University of Cambridge

She is CO-I on the Desirable Digitalisations project and PI on the Ammagamma project, an AI ethics and regulation project that helps companies respond to the EU AI act. She also uses feminist and anti-racist ideas to improve society’s understanding of AI, for example, to demonstrate why AI-powered hiring tools can’t de-bias hiring, and why AI can’t make neutral predictions about which protests are likely to turn violent. This work has been covered by the BBC, Forbes, The Telegraph, The Guardian, Glamour Magazine and internationally. She has also spoken about her work on the BBC World Service, BBC Radio 3 & 4, and the Irish National Radio.

She is the co-host of the award-winning The Good Robot Podcast (top 5% globally), where she interviews top scholars and technologists about AI ethics, and is a TikToker for Carole Cadwalladr's All The Citizens' data rights channel. She’s the author of An Experience of the Impossible: The Planetary Humanism of European Women’s SF (Oct 2023), and co-editor of The Good Robot: Feminist Voices on the Future of Technology (Feb 2024), and Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data and Intelligent Machines (Oct 2023). She has also worked with Deepmind, The Financial Times, The United Nations Data Science & Ethics GroupS, CNN, BNP Paribas, The Open Data Institute (ODI), and the Institute of Science & Technology. Eleanor is a Bye-Fellow and Tutor at Gonville & Caius College.

Dr Xine Yao

Lecturer in American Literature in English to 1900 at UCL Department of English

Xine Yao hails from Toronto, Canada (B.A. Trinity College at the University of Toronto, M.A. Dalhousie University, M.A. Cornell University, Ph.D. Cornell University). She joined UCL in 2018 as Lecturer in American Literature in English to 1900. Xine is co-director of qUCL. Xine’s primary research focuses on early and nineteenth-century American literature through affect theory, critical race and ethnic studies, and feminist and queer of colour theory. Her interests include histories of science and law, literatures in English from the Black and Asian diasporas, science fiction, the Gothic, comics/graphic novels, and digital humanities. Xine’s publications explore solidarity and comparative racialization between Black, Asian, and Indigenous peoples.