ΑΙhub.org
 

The Good Robot Podcast: Featuring Helen Hester


by
10 July 2024



share this:
Space scene with words Good Robot Podcast

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. In this episode, Helen Hester talks about technology used around the house.

Can technology save us from housework? with Helen Hester

We bring to you a special LIVE episode from Tech Transformed! In it, Kerry talks to Helen Hester. Helen is a leading thinker of feminism, technology and the future of work, and she explores the history of domestic technologies, so technology used around the house. It’s really important that we understand that technologies like the washing machine were actually not as liberatory for women as we’d like to think. In fact, they may have actually prevented women from rising up against domestic labour. Helen also talks about how medical care is increasingly being outsourced to home spaces, and why smart home technology is making our lives more convenient, but not necessarily less laborious. We hope you enjoy the show.

Listen to the episode here:

Helen Hester joined the University of West London from Middlesex University, where she had served as Lecturer in Promotional Cultures and Senior Lecturer in Media. Her research interests include technofeminism, sexuality studies, and theories of social reproduction, and she is a member of the international feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks. Helen is the author of Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014) and the co-editor of the collections Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism (Ashgate, 2015) and Dea ex Machina (Merve, 2015). She is also the series editor for Ashgate’s ‘Sexualities in Society’ book series.

Find the episode reading list here.

About The Good Robot Podcast

Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry Mackereth are Research Associates at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where they work on the Mercator-Stiflung funded project on Desirable Digitalisation. Previously, they were Christina Gaw Postdoctoral Researchers in Gender and Technology at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies. During the COVID-19 pandemic they decided to co-found The Good Robot Podcast to explore the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology.




The Good Robot Podcast

            AUAI is supported by:



Subscribe to AIhub newsletter on substack



Related posts :

How AI changes human decision-making

  23 Oct 2026
AI can identify patterns that people miss and bring new information into decision-making. However, this does not automatically lead to better decisions.

Competing in RoboCup@Home and winning the 2026 best paper award: an interview with Raphael Memmesheimer

  22 Oct 2026
Hear more about Raphael's research and his involvement in the RoboCup@Home league.

AI is distorting archaeology and flattening Indigenous Knowledge

While AI can help archaeologists, it can also spread pseudoscientific claims and false histories, stripping Indigenous Knowledge of context, consent and community control.

ACM SIGAI Autonomous Agents Award 2027 open for nominations

  20 Oct 2026
Nominations are solicited for the 2027 ACM SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award.

AI is helping ease competition for scarce space on the airwaves

  19 Oct 2026
Every time you make a phone call, stream a video or connect to Wi-Fi, your device is sending and receiving invisible signals through the air.

How AI is helping cities tackle invisible pollution

  16 Oct 2026
Researchers are designing AI-powered virtual cities to help authorities predict street-level pollution and act where it is needed most.

#AIES2026 social media round-up

  15 Oct 2026
Find out what participants got up to at the Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society.

Credit fairness: lending resources without losing out

and   14 Oct 2026
Studying the allocation of shared resources among agents with time-varying demands.


↑


AUAI is supported by:







Subscribe to AIhub newsletter on substack




 















©2026.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence