Unabridged Interview: Shannon Vallor

Lee C. Camp (0:00)

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Hello friends, Lee C. Camp here. You're listening to No Small Endeavor. This is our unabridged interview with Professor Shannon Vallor. Shannon is one of those philosophers I had long been looking for to ask a different set of questions about technology and AI that I was missing, and a lot of the folks who were supposedly doing ethics around AI and ethics around technology. So often you get these sorts of maybe moralistic, legalistic, narrowly considered set of rules around technology. And I was wondering, where are the people asking virtue questions? Where are the people asking the engaging questions about moral philosophy? And Ramon Chowdhury that we interviewed a year or two ago, formerly head of ethics at what the time was Twitter, before Elon Musk took over and dismissed all that crowd, had said, you need to talk to Shannon Vallor. And so we had the opportunity recently to go to Edinburgh, thanks to the Templeton World Charity Foundation grant, and sit down in person with Shannon there at the University of Edinburgh. She's the head of the Center for Technomoral Futures, which is a great title for a department in the university, and it was a lovely conversation. I hope you can find this helpful and generative of a lot of provocative questions. Here's Professor Shannon Vallor.

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Lee C. Camp (3:51)

Professor Shannon Vallor, welcome to No Small Endeavor.

Shannon Vallor (3:55)

Thanks and welcome to Edinburgh and to the Futures Institute.

Lee C. Camp (3:58)

We're delighted to be here with you in Edinburgh and the Center for Technomoral Futures, right? That's it. Yeah, we're grateful to be here and grateful for you having us.

Let me begin with one way of summarizing what I understand you to be doing and then just see how well I will I get at it. I hear you saying among numerous things that we so focus that it's common to focus upon some sort of doomism about the machines becoming human-like and the possible devastation that might cause. And I hear you saying we might need to be paying a whole lot more attention to the way the machines are already shaping our formation and the kind of people we are. And we should be paying a lot of attention to those sets of questions. Is that one fair way of getting at a major stream of your thought?