2024.12.10 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Shannon Vallor, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking, Oxford University Press, 2024, 272pp., $29.99 (hbk), ISBN 9780197759066.
Reviewed by Mathias Risse, Harvard University
Reviewed by Mathias Risse, Harvard University
Shannon Vallor is one of the most interesting figures in the contemporary philosophical debate about humanity’s future with technology. Her 2018 book, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting, rethinks virtue ethics for this era of technological breakthroughs. Social media, artificial intelligence, robotics, and so on significantly impact how contemporary humans turn out and thus provide much of the contexts in which humans develop their characters. She explores how these technologies can both enable and impede the development of virtues like honesty, patience, or empathy. Too often those who build these technologies are driven by a problem-solving mindset. Vallor suggests to them that they should go beyond such a mindset and seek to create technologies that help cultivate human virtues…
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