Dr Kerry McInerney and Dr Eleanor Drage
125 episodes listed below
Feminist questions for technological power.
The Good Robot brings experts into patient, politically explicit conversations about what technology is doing in the world. Its best episodes move from concepts like AI mythology or ethical mathematics to cameras, elections, checkpoints, classrooms, and speech that machines fail to understand.
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The Good Robot is an interview-led technology show built around one deceptively simple problem: what would it mean for technology to be good. Its answer is never quick. Dr. Eleanor Drage and Dr. Kerry McInerney approach AI, mathematics, language, and surveillance as systems shaped by histories, institutions, incentives, and power. The style is spacious and reflective. Guests are allowed to think in full paragraphs, and the hosts often restate the shape of an argument before turning it toward a sharper question. That makes the show unusually hospitable to complex ideas. It can talk about mythology, intelligence, child language acquisition, elections, and biometric databases without flattening them into slogans. A conversation with Dr. Stephen Cave follows the origin myths behind artificial intelligence, asking why the field became attached to particular stories of artificiality and intelligence rather than other names and frames. A conversation with Dr. Maurice Ciodo treats mathematics as a site of responsibility, especially when abstract work becomes part of weapons, political targeting, or high-risk systems. A conversation with Rebecca Woods brings linguistics into the LLM debate, comparing language models with the social and contextual ways children learn meaning. It is a lively episode, but the argument is precise. Words do not float free from use. A conversation with Dr. Matt Mamoudi turns facial recognition into a question of movement, occupation, policing, and infrastructure in Hebron and East Jerusalem. The show is at its strongest when theory meets something physical: a camera, a checkpoint, a voting ad, a classroom exercise, a pronoun that changes meaning depending on who is speaking. Its politics are explicit. Its manner is generous. The Good Robot does not treat feminism as a theme added onto technology coverage; it treats feminist analysis as a way to notice who is exposed, who benefits, who is believed, and who gets to build. The result is careful, critical listening for people who want the social life of technology explained with both intellectual seriousness and human scale.
Made for: Suited to listeners who want critical technology conversations grounded in research, politics, and everyday examples. Especially strong for people interested in AI ethics, feminist theory, language, surveillance, and social justice.
What sets it apart: The Good Robot stands out by pairing academic depth with concrete cases, letting guests build nuanced arguments while keeping attention on material consequences. It treats technology criticism as both intellectual work and political responsibility.
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.
Based on 4 episodes we listened to · September 2026
The Good Robot connects technical mechanisms to ethics, power, and human consequences through focused conversations with researchers and practitioners.
The Good Robot turns expert interviews into careful tests of the assumptions buried inside technical systems. Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney keep ethics tied to mechanics: Rebecca Woods connects child language acquisition and pragmatic context to the limits of large language…
The words 'artificial intelligence' themselves go on trial before you take their promise at face value.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Numbers may look neutral here, but the episode keeps showing where that story breaks down.
The episode treats ethical maths as the main story, and it keeps widening the frame until numbers feel less like neutral abstractions and more like tools with consequences. Dr.
Language, context, and GPT come into focus in a conversation that favors precision over hype.
Rebecca Woods turns language into a concrete test of how GPT works, and the episode is at its best when it stays close to context, pragmatics, and the way children learn words in social settings.
A grounded look at facial-recognition surveillance shaping Palestinian movement and daily life.
Surveillance in Palestine is the subject here, with facial recognition presented as a tool for turning movement into something tracked and controlled.
The future, tested against evidence.
AI analysis from the edge of adoption.
Future systems, argued in long form.
Innovation, measured by who it actually reaches.
Cassandra Hartblay, author of 'Access Vernaculars', says her fieldwork in Petrozavodsk, Russia showed disabled people describing inaccessible spaces as not 'smooth, peaceful, easy, normal' rather than using formal UN-derived terms.
Tara Merk defines good technology as systems designed for the people they serve and accountable to their needs.
An interview with Teresa Hardaway about racialized design and abolitionist design studio practices.
The episode asks what ethical maths could even mean.
The Good Robot speaks with Rebecca Woods, a senior lecturer in language and cognition at Newcastle University.
The Good Robot speaks with Dr.