Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology.
In this episode, we chat about coming back from summer break, and discuss a research paper recently published by Kerry and the AI ethicist and researcher Os Keyes called The Infopolitics of Feeling: How race and disability are configured in Emotion Recognition Technology. We discuss why AI tools that promise to be able to read our emotions from our faces are scientifically and politically suspect. We then explore the ableist foundations of what used to be the most famous Emotion AI firm in the world: Affectiva. Kerry also explains how the Stop Asian Hate and Black Lives Matters protests of 2020 inspired this research project, and why she thinks that emotion recognition technologies have no place in our societies.
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For the reading list and transcript for this episode, visit The Good Robot website.
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Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney 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.