The 2026 Right Livelihood Awards were announced on Wednesday in Stockholm, Sweden. The award is widely known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. The winners include Jalila Haider, a human rights lawyer who defends some of Pakistan’s most vulnerable communities; the Rural Women’s Assembly, for organizing rural women across South Africa; the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association, for building and safeguarding democracy in the nation of Georgia; and AI researcher Timnit Gebru, who is the founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute. Timnit Gebru spoke to Democracy Now! last month about how artificial intelligence is entrenching societal biases and inequality.

Timnit Gebru: “And so, we warned about also people interacting with these kinds of texts output by these kinds of systems, attributing a mind behind whatever text they’re seeing. And so, you know, right now, these chatbots, like Claude or ChatGPT, are designed to make you believe that there’s some sort of superhuman brain behind whatever is outputting these texts. And that’s hugely dangerous. And even though we weren’t speaking about chatbots back then, we were already talking about the tendency of people to attribute a mind behind these texts, and so, which means that, you know, they can be deceived into believing that there’s something that the — something more than a model outputting text.

“And the final thing we warned about was: What is the cost of pursuing this singular direction in terms of research and resources? What is the cost of shutting out all other possible futures, all other ways of building machine learning systems, which is a subspecialty of artificial intelligence, or any other kind of paradigm? Because it seemed like the whole field was only investing in this singular direction of building larger and larger models, that are guzzling all of the data — I mean, stealing so many people’s works — and based on exploited labor and killing the environment. …

“I want people to understand that tech does not have to be the way it is right now. But I always loved math and physics, and I also thought it was a refuge from the messy world of war, and which is what made me leave Ethiopian politics. But I later learned that that’s not true, actually. The war and politics that I left is what drives the world of math and science and technology, as well. And if we don’t understand that, we’ll continue to harm our own people and, as engineers and scientists, build terrible and harmful products instead of ones that actually support our communities.”