The Good Robot
Join Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney as they ask the experts: what is good technology? Is ‘good’ technology even possible? And how can feminism help us work towards it? Each week, they invite scholars, industry practitioners, activists, and more to provide their unique perspective on what feminism can bring to the tech industry and the way that we think about technology. With each conversation, The Good Robot asks how feminism can provide new perspectives on technology’s biggest problems.
The Good Robot
AI, Disability, and Accessibility with Cynthia Bennett
In this episode we chat to Cynthia Bennett, one of the leading voices in AI and Accessibility and Disability Studies. She’s currently a researcher at Apple and a postdoctoral scholar at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. We discuss combatting the model of disability as deficit, how feminism and disability approaches can help democratise whose knowledge about AI is taken into consideration when we build technology, and why the people who make technology need to be representative of the people who use it. We also discuss the things that go wrong with AI that helps disabled users navigate their environment, particularly what can go wrong when using images labelled by humans.