Host Elizabeth Renieris is joined by Dr. Shannon Vallor, the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh's Edinburgh Futures Institute, where she directs the Centre for Technomoral Futures. She is also a professor in philosophy, and her research explores the philosophy and ethics of emerging science and technologies.

Shannon is particularly well known for her work in virtue ethics. In explaining its focus on “the way in which our actions and our habits shape our moral character,” she noted that the principles of virtue ethics resonate across a number of cultures and why the tradition’s emphasis on our daily practices interested her as a way to think about technology.

In addition, Shannon described her use of the term “technomoral” as a way to emphasize, counter to the thesis of technological neutrality, that technology cannot in fact be separated from our values, and vice versa. Elizabeth asked her about the idea of moral debt, as well, specifically as it relates to AI. Shannon discussed how paying attention to ethics at the design stage is one important strategy for limiting this debt but that appropriate regulation, corporate responsibility in deployment, and systems that study how technologies are actually working out in the world are equally critical.

More About Our Guest

A member of the faculty at the University of Edinburgh since 2020, Dr. Shannon Vallor was previously Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor of Philosophy at Santa Clara University. She studies how human character is being transformed by rapid advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, new social media, surveillance, and biomedical technologies.

Shannon is the author of the book Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting and the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology, both published by Oxford University Press. Currently the chair of the Scottish government’s Data Delivery Group, she was the winner of the 2015 World Technology Award in Ethics from the World Technology Network.

Links

• Shannon’s Book Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting
• Centre for Technomoral Futures
• Episode Transcript