Shannon Vallor is the Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Santa Clara University and an Artificial Intelligence Ethicist/Visiting Researcher at Google. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics.
Her research explores the philosophy and ethics of emerging science and technologies. Her 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.
Her 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. She is the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology and is 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.
Dr. Vallor has a special interest in the integration of ethics with industry and engineering/computer science education, and she engages 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.
