Timnit Gebru on artificial intelligence, in conversation with Casey Fiesler

Timnit Gebru is founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute. Prior to that she was fired by Google in December 2020 for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace, where she was serving as co-lead of the Ethical AI research team. Timnit also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility and health of Black people in the field of AI, and is on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian and Jamaican highschool students. She has received a number of accolades including being named one of Nature’s Ten people who helped shape science and one of TIME 100’s most influential people. She is currently writing Deep Unlearning: The Rise of AI and the Radicalization of a Tech Idealist, a memoir + manifesto arguing for a technological future that serves our communities instead of one that is used for surveillance, warfare, and the centralization of power by Silicon Valley.

Casey Fiesler is an associate professor and the William R. Payden Endowed Professor in the Department of Information Science (and Computer Science, by courtesy) at the University of Colorado Boulder. Armed with a PhD in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech and a JD from Vanderbilt Law School, she primarily researches technology ethics and law, human-computer-interaction, and online communities (occasionally all at the same time).