The Meeting with Shannon Vallor

I met Shannon Vallor, Director of the Data & Artificial Intelligence Ethics programme at the Centre for Technomoral Futures at the University of Edinburgh. The Centre, established in 2020, supports the Futures Institute’s mission to advance critical understanding for navigating complex futures.

Vallor’s work centres on Virtue Ethics, which goes beyond judging individual actions as right or wrong. Rather, it “provides guidance as to the sort of characteristics and behaviours a good person will seek to achieve,” focusing on a person’s entire life rather than isolated episodes.

I found this perspective transformative for thinking about AI ethics. Instead of evaluating whether specific actions are ethical, virtue ethics encourages viewing decisions as part of a cohesive whole — understanding them as extensions of an entity’s unified character.

Vallor offered several insights during our conversation:

• Without ethics, technology decisions become hollow
• AI ethicists will be increasingly valuable, though training remains flexible rather than specialised
• A “T-shaped” education approach works best: broad exploration in year one, then narrowing focus toward a final project centred on intervention

The meeting reinforced my decision to pursue formal education in this field.