Sex, Race and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI

At 27, Ayanna Howard was hired by NASA to lead a team designing a robot for future Mars exploration missions that could "think like a human and adapt to change." She went on to lead engineers and scientists working on the next generation of Mars rovers at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, chair the computing department at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and co-found Zyrobotics, an ed-tech company whose STEM education and therapy products are designed for children with special needs. She became the first woman to lead the 10,000-student College of Engineering at The Ohio State University, and in August 2026 she became the 12th president of Spelman College.

Howard's work spans more than 300 peer-reviewed publications and has made her a foremost authority on human emotion-centered robotic design. Her message to leaders is direct: AI stands to improve health care, education, manufacturing and remote work, but only if it is built to be trusted. "The only way to prevent biases from seeping into the development of technologies is to ensure they are created with diversity of thought," she says. Homogeneous teams build biased products; diverse ones broaden an organization's reach. On oversight she is blunt: "Unregulated AI is just as dangerous as unregulated pharmaceuticals."