Madeleine Clare Elish
Research Lead, Intelligence & Autonomy
Madeleine Clare Elish is a cultural anthropologist whose work examines the social impacts of machine intelligence and automation on society. She is currently a researcher at Data & Society in New York, a non-profit research institute focused on the social impacts of data-driven technology. At Data & Society, she leads the Intelligence & Autonomy Initiative, which develops grounded, qualitative research in order to provide nuanced understandings of emerging machine learning and automated technologies and to inform the design, evaluation, and regulation of AI-driven systems. Her work has investigated how automated technologies affect understandings of values and ethical norms, and how work lives change in response. She recently completed her dissertation at Columbia University in Anthropology after conducting fieldwork with military and defense contractor communities involved in U.S. Air Force drone operations, and examining how distributed drone operations are affecting conceptions of skill, expertise, and military service in the United States. She previously earned an S.M. in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. She can be found occasionally on twitter @m_c_elish.