This seminar will be held online on Zoom. You can register here.

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About the book

In her new book The AI Mirror: Reclaiming Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking, Shannon Vallor offers a diagnosis of the real threat to our humanity posed by today’s generative AI technologies, while challenging the false hype and doom narratives that paint us as helpless in the face of imminent machine supremacy. The book exposes how today’s AI really works, while making a case for what AI could be: a way to reclaim our human potential for moral and intellectual growth, rather than lose ourselves in mirrors of the past. It encourages us to pursue technology that helps us recover our sense of the possible, and with it the confidence and courage to repair a broken world.

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About Shannon Vallor

Prof. Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also appointed in Philosophy. She directs the Centre for Technomoral Futures in EFI, and is co-Director of the UKRI’s BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides) programme. Professor Vallor's research explores how AI, robotics, and data science reshape human moral character, habits, and practices. Her work includes advising policymakers and industry on the ethical design and use of AI, and she is a former Visiting Researcher and AI Ethicist at Google. She is the author of Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (Oxford University Press, 2016) and The AI Mirror: Reclaiming Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford University Press, 2024).