Join moderator Supervisor Jackie Fielder for an evening exploring how we, as everyday people, can take back our economy and democracy from artificial intelligence. We will explore what we even mean when we talk about “AI,” whether we’re in an AI bubble, the impacts of AI, whether we should be afraid of AI, and who’s behind the AI hype. This panel is jam-packed with women authors whose books have inspired critical conversations about AI and the tech sector at large: Dr. Alex Hanna, co-author of The AI Con, Wendy Liu, author of Abolish Silicon Valley, and Tamara Kneese, author of Notes Toward a Digital Workers’ Inquiry. Wendy Liu made a career switch from software engineer to writer, a move that was sparked by reading lots of books at a time when her startup was tanking. Now she mostly writes about the horrors of Silicon Valley and why tech workers need to organise. She is the author of Abolish Silicon Valley. Dr. Alex Hanna is a writer and sociologist of technology, labor, and politics. She is the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). Her work examines how new computational technologies--such as AI and machine learning--exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality through their data practices and effects on labor. With Emily M. Bender, Dr. Hanna is the co-author of The AI Con (Harper, 2025), a book about AI and the hype around it. They also run the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 series, playfully and wickedly tearing apart AI hype on their livestream and podcast. She also works in the area of social movements, focusing on the dynamics of anti-racist campus protest in the US and Canada. She holds a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics and a BA in Sociology from Purdue University, and an MS and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Tamara Kneese is a Senior Research Scientist at Partnership on AI and a Practitioner Fellow at the University of Virginia's Environmental Institute. She is the author of Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in The Life and Beyond (Yale University Press 2023) and co-author (with Capacitor Collective) of Notes Toward a Digital Workers' Inquiry (Common Notions 2025). Supervisor Jackie Fielder is a Mission renter, public bank organizer, former city commissioner and educator, and climate and environmental justice advocate. Jackie got her start in the #NoDAPL movement by organizing for divestment from the Wall Street banks financing the Dakota Access Pipeline. In 2017, she co-founded the San Francisco Defund DAPL Coalition and the San Francisco Public Bank Coalition to start the nation’s first city-owned bank to support small businesses, affordable housing, and renewable energy. She’s the proud granddaughter of Mexican immigrants and Native American grandparents and a citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes of North Dakota, with Two Kettle Lakota and Hidatsa descent. She graduated from Stanford University in 2016 with a Bachelors of Arts in Public Policy and a Masters of Arts in Sociology.