Reprogram - by Kerry McInerney & Eleanor Drage (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

How feminist activists, thinkers, and artists are challenging AI's status quo and envisioning new and better ways to design and use technology

For too long, AI has been the domain of tech bros and their wild fantasies. From gender-based discrimination in the AI workforce to subservient, feminized assistants like Siri and Alexa, the industry and its products are failing women. Reprogram draws on feminism's immense creative, diagnostic, and imaginative power to chart a better path forward.

Building on a long history of feminists as inventors, creators, and change-makers, Kerry McInerney and Eleanor Drage showcase the work of inspiring activists, thinkers, and technologists who are transforming a broken industry in innovative and unusual ways. Guided by key feminist ideas, McInerney and Drage demonstrate how feminists are rewriting the rules about whose voices and experiences matter in AI and who and what it should be for. From computer scientists who are programming beyond the gender binary to union workers who are collectively standing up to Big Tech's overreach, this book shares a hopeful vision for AI, one grounded in equality, solidarity, and justice.

Cutting against apathy, fear, and disempowerment, Reprogram explains why changing AI isn't just necessary but possible, inspiring us to imagine an altogether different future using the knowledge and perspectives that feminism can offer.

About the Author

Kerry McInerney is a Lecturer at the University of Auckland's School of Computer Science and an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Eleanor Drage is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where she is Co-Director of the Narratives and Justice Programme at the Leverhulme Centre. She is the host of The Good Robot Podcast and the author of What If We Got AI Right? McInerney and Drage are the coeditors of The Good Robot and Feminist AI and were the cohosts of The Good Robot Podcast from 2021 to 2025.