30/09/2026
What if the real question about AI isn’t what machines will do — but what people are already doing with them?
Meet Timnit Gebru, one of the 2026 Right Livelihood Laureates and a pioneering AI researcher challenging who gets to shape the future of technology.
While much of the AI debate focuses on what superintelligent machines might do one day, Gebru looks at what is happening now: discrimination embedded in technology, exploited labour, surveillance and growing environmental costs.
Through the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), she is also pioneering a different way of doing research — one in which people directly affected by technology help determine what should be investigated and how.
Data workers investigate their own working conditions. Researchers map the companies, governments and investors behind surveillance technologies. Communities become producers of knowledge rather than simply subjects of research.
Her work challenges the idea that AI is an autonomous or inevitable force. Behind it are human decisions about labour, data, resources, ownership and power — which means different decisions are possible.
💬 “I feel that our imagination has been colonised. It’s up to us to have a different path.”
Right Livelihood honours Timnit Gebru “for challenging concentrated power in artificial intelligence and pioneering digital technology rooted in justice, lived experience and human agency.”
🔗 https://rightlivelihood.org/the-change-makers/find-a-laureate/timnit-gebru/
