Timnit Gebru

Thu April 15, 2027 at 6:30PM

Telus Studio Theatre, Chan Centre

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Bundles on sale Nov 12, single tickets on sale Dec 3

about the speaker

Dr. Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute. In 2020, while serving as co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI research team, she was fired for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace. Timnit also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility and health of Black people in the field of AI.

She sits on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian and Jamaican high school students. She has received numerous accolades including being named one of Nature’s 10 people who helped shape science and one of TIME’s 100 most influential people. She was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 2026 for her work in challenging concentrated power in artificial intelligence and pioneering digital technology rooted in justice, lived experience and human agency. 

Her upcoming book, Deep Unlearning: The Rise of AI and the Radicalization of a Tech Idealist, is a memoir and manifesto that argues for a technological future that serves communities rather than one built for surveillance, warfare, and the concentration of power in Silicon Valley.

About the series

The return of Donald Trump to the White House has been described as a rupture – from democratic norms, from the post-war alliance system, from established economic models, and from the rules-based international order the United States itself built. Historians remind us, however, the pressures at play in this political moment are not new. American unilateralism, economic disruption, and democratic backsliding have deep roots and did not necessarily arrive with any one administration.

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