About Ria

Ria Kalluri is a scholar and artist shedding light on the ways emerging technologies are shifting power in the world, while she builds alternative sites of anti-oppressive beauty. In her scholarship, she braids AI and sociology with a critical theory lens and focuses on investigating each phase of the AI creation path – from ecological extraction of resources and labor through AI research and the global rise of AI technologies. Through many disciplinary and political lenses, she presents a depth of evidence that AI is overwhelmingly concentrating power in the hands of the already powerful. Her work has been central in shaping radical AI research and has been described in Nature, Scientific American, the MIT Tech Review, National Institute of Standards and Technology reports, MIT and Stanford courses, and popular media outlets. She follows this line of inquiry in part to expose the contingency of the dominant paradigm: for those wading through difficult-to-pin-down emerging technologies, she believes it is validating, strategic, and powerful to have a map for understanding, shaping, dismantling, or transforming the nature of these technologies. Ria holds a Bachelor of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is currently a scholar and teacher at Stanford University, while also facilitating a series of alternative radical, abolitionist spaces for world-building. Her projects have been supported by the Stanford Engineering Fellowship, the P.D. Soros Fellowship, the Open Philanthropy AI Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Fellowship, and the MacArthur Foundation. In her own words, ria wishes to live her life as a poem — a life that is queer, ecosexual, erotic, wild, wandering, rebellious, kind, magic, and of the ocean. She would be honored to gift or receive a poem, in any of poetry’s infinite forms.