Shannon Vallor

Works

• 2016Technology and the Virtues

  Living well with emerging technologies needs “technomoral virtues”, drawn from Aristotelian, Confucian and Buddhist ethics.

• 2024The AI Mirror

  Today’s AI systems are mirrors that reflect patterns of our past data back at us; to mistake them for minds endangers our capacity to choose a different future.

Position

“Technology and the Virtues” argues that rule-based ethics cannot keep pace with emerging technologies such as social media, robots and artificial intelligence, whose effects are unpredictable and global. What we need instead is character: “technomoral virtues” – honesty, self-control, humility, justice, courage, empathy, care, civility, flexibility, perspective, magnanimity and, uniting them, technomoral wisdom – cultivated through practice. She builds this account from three traditions, Aristotelian, Confucian and Buddhist ethics, which share the idea that virtue is acquired through habituation, attention and moral exemplars. She also warns of “moral deskilling”: when machines take over caring, judging or fighting, humans may lose the practical skills that virtue requires. “The AI Mirror” argues that today’s AI systems, trained on records of past human behaviour, are mirrors rather than minds: they reflect back our existing patterns, including our biases, and tempt us to mistake this reflection for a superior intelligence. The danger is less that machines become like us than that we come to see ourselves in their image and lose confidence in our own capacity to reason, judge and imagine new possibilities.

Life & context

Shannon Vallor is an American philosopher. She took her doctorate in philosophy at Boston College in 2001, with early work on Husserl’s phenomenology and on scientific realism, and taught at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley from 2003 to 2020, latterly as Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor of Philosophy. She was president of the Society for Philosophy and Technology and worked as a consulting AI ethicist for Google Cloud. In 2020 she became the first holder of the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, where she directs the Centre for Technomoral Futures at the Edinburgh Futures Institute and co-directs the research programme BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides).

Further main works

• Moral Deskilling and Upskilling in a New Machine Age (2015)

Appears in

• Debate ‘Can Machines Think or Feel?’
• Debate ‘Algorithms, Fairness and Power’