Shannon Vallor

Shannon Vallor is an American philosopher of technology who since 2020 has held the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh’s Edinburgh Futures Institute — the first chair of its kind in the UK. She earned her PhD at Boston College, taught for years at Santa Clara University, and served as a consulting AI ethicist for Google Cloud, giving her critique an insider’s grounding. Her 2016 book “Technology and the Virtues” established her as a leading voice on how technology shapes moral character.

The AI Mirror

Her 2024 book “The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking” — which Fast Company called the year’s best critique of AI — argues that large language models are not minds but immense mirrors, generating reflections cast by humanity’s recorded thoughts and judgments. Like Narcissus, she warns, we risk becoming captivated by our own reflection. The book rejects both boosterish claims that AI thinks like us and doomer fantasies of a malevolent machine dictator, locating the real danger elsewhere: in “moral deskilling,” as automated reasoning crowds out the practice by which humans cultivate judgment.

Vallor is an engaged philosopher rather than a prohibitionist — she has worked inside the industry and argues for reclaiming AI, not abolishing it. But her public interventions are consistently warnings: that people wrongly believe “the sun is setting on human decision-making,” and that ceding moral and political reasoning to statistical mirrors would hollow out what makes human life significant.