Shannon Vallor - Home

Currently the Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley, and starting in February 2020, the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence. Through January 2020, I am also an AI Ethicist/Visiting Researcher at Google.

My research explores the philosophy and ethics of emerging science and technologies. My current research project focuses on the impact of emerging technologies--particularly those involving automation and artificial intelligence--on the moral and intellectual habits, skills and virtues of human beings: our character.

My work investigates how human character is being transformed by rapid advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, new social media, surveillance, and biomedical technologies, and appears in journals such as Ethics and Information Technology, Philosophy & Technology, and Techne, as well as a 2016 book from Oxford University Press: Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting. I am the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology and am currently working on a new book on the subject of artificial intelligence and ethics: The AI Mirror: Rebuilding Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking.

I have a special interest in the integration of ethics with industry and engineering/computer science education, and I engage in outreach on this subject with a range of stakeholders inside and outside academia, including government, industry, law, media and public policy professionals and advocates. Recent professional honors include the 2015 World Technology Award in Ethics.

Technology and the Virtues (available now from Oxford University Press)

Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting

Available from Oxford University Press here or on Amazon.com
2016. $39.95, 309 pp. Hardcover, Paperback, and e-book

Applies classical philosophical traditions of virtue ethics to contemporary challenges of a global technological society
Argues for the unique value of virtue ethics as an ideal moral framework for the 21st century human condition, in which the future of the human family is increasingly clouded by uncertainty, instability, complexity and risk
Develops and applies a moral framework that is informed by a culturally diverse group of philosophical virtue traditions, including Aristotelian, Confucian and Buddhist perspectives
Applies the framework to specific ethical challenges from emerging technologies: military and social robotics, new social media, digital surveillance and self-tracking, and biomedical enhancement
Addresses risks and opportunities facing an increasingly networked and interdependent human family, challenges that demand an unprecedented cultivation of collective moral wisdom on a newly global scale