Keynote Speakers
Karen Hao was formerly a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, covering American and Chinese tech companies, and a senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review. Her work has been cited by Congress, featured in university curriculums, and remade into museum exhibits. She has won numerous accolades, including an American Humanist Media Award and a National Magazine Award for Journalists Under 30. Karen also sits on the AI advisory board of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Prior to journalism, she was an application engineer at the first startup to spin out of Google, and she received a B.S. in mechanical engineering and minor in energy studies from MIT.
In Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (Penguin Press, 2025), Karen, the first journalist to ever profile OpenAI, tells the behind-the-scenes story of how a cadre of the most powerful companies in human history is reshaping the world in its image. “Excellent and deeply reported” (The New York Times), Empire of AI is an “essential work of public education” (Zuboff), “a bestselling page-turner that has made waves not just in Silicon Valley but around the world” (TIME), and a revelatory portrait of the people controlling this technology. It is the jaw-dropping story of ambition and ego, hype and speculation, plunder and destruction, politics and labor, and, of course, money and power—a brilliant and deeply necessary look at the industry defining our era, and what the future holds.
Paola Ricaurte is a full professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She is the co-founder of Tierra Común, an academic and activist network committed to decolonizing data, and leads the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist AI Network. Her work bridges academia, activism, innovation and policymaking, with a central focus on human rights from decolonial and feminist perspectives. Paola serves on several international expert committees, including the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), UNESCO’s AI Ethics Experts Without Borders (AIEB), and the Women for Ethical AI (W4EAI) platform. She was included in the 2025 TIME100 AI list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence.
Discussion groups after Karen Hao’s led by esteemed MIT professors, researchers, and affiliates:
Abha Sur (WGS), Andreia Martinho (Tufts), Arvind Satyanarayan (Course 6), Ashia Wilson (Course 6), Balakrishnan Rajagopal (Course 11), Behnaz Farahi (Media Lab), Carlos Centeno (McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society), Caroline Jones (Course 4), Catherine D’Ignazio (Course 11), Clara Montague (WGS), Dwai Bannerjee (STS), Eden Medina (STS), Erik Sandelin (Course 11), Hafsa Arain (WGS), Jacob Andreas (Course 6), Jason Jackson (Course 11), Joaquin Terrones (WGS/Literature),Lauren Klein (Emory University), Lily Tsai (Political Science), Marzyeh Ghassemi (Course 6, AI for Society), Paloma Duong (CMS/W), Rachel Fagen (TechTonic Justice), Sally Haslanger (Philosophy), Sandy Alexandre (Literature), Sara Beery (Course 6, AI for Society), Umutcan Ay (IDSS)