Dr. Eleanor Drage
Eleanor is a Senior Research Fellow at the 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.
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Good AI? Humanity, Technology & Justice
In this talk, Eleanor debunks some myths about AI, combatting misinformation and illuminating some of the blind spots in our current understanding of what AI is and what it can do. She gives an overview of the key ethical issues and explains why we need to rethink our relationship to technology. Along the way, she explores nature of quantification ("why some things can't be counted”), the disquieting implications of AI's encroachment on civil liberties and protests, and how feminist and anti-racist ideas are enriching AI development and regulation.