AI + Values – The AI Mirror | Shannon Vallor

BOOK TITLE: The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking

AUTHOR: Prof. Shannon Vallor

BOOK OVERVIEW: (Source: Bookshop.org)

For many, technology offers hope for the future—that promise of shared human flourishing and liberation that always seems to elude our species. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies spark this hope in a particular way. They promise a future in which human limits and frailties are finally overcome—not by us, but by our machines.

Yet rather than open new futures, today’s powerful AI technologies reproduce the past. Forged from oceans of our data into immensely powerful but flawed mirrors, they reflect the same errors, biases, and failures of wisdom that we strive to escape. Our new digital mirrors point backward. They show only where the data say that we have already been, never where we might venture together for the first time.

To meet today’s grave challenges to our species and our planet, we will need something new from AI, and from ourselves.

Shannon Vallor makes a wide-ranging, prophetic, and philosophical 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. Rejecting prophecies of doom, she 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. Prof. Vallor calls us to rethink what AI is and can be, and what we want to be with it.

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 EFI’s Centre for Technomoral Futures 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 character, habits, and practices. Her work includes advising policymakers and industry on the ethical design and use of AI, and she is a former 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: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford University Press, 2024). The book is a Finalist for the 2025 PROSE Awards and was shortlisted for the Al-Rodhan Book Prize of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

RELATED LINKS:

• • LinkedIn
  • Book website
  • How philosopher Shannon Vallor delivered the year’s best critique of AI (Fast Company)
  • Shannon Vallor says AI does present an existential risk — but not the one you think (Vox) 
  • In the Age of A.I., What Makes People Unique? (New Yorker)
  • How to be human in an age of AI (The New Statesman)
  • A Faustian fable (TLS)

• The AI Mirror — how technology blocks human potential (Financial Times)

AI Is the Black Mirror (Nautilus)