Professor Shannon Vallor: reclaiming humane technology

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Only children are often treated as mini adults by the grown-ups around them, and this was certainly the case for Shannon Vallor. With working parents and no siblings to play with, she instead became her grandfather’s sparring partner in the art of debate. From a very young age he cultivated her ability to form and defend an opinion before testing out her skills at the dinner table, much to her grandmother’s exasperation. Not wanting to be caught out unprepared, Shannon would read the newspaper to arm herself with educated takes on matters of science, politics and current affairs.

In my family it was social capital to be able to have a strong opinion and defend it vociferously

“So from very early on my interests were seated in questioning and analysing things, integrating the evidence, making judgments and defending those judgments.” Her philosophical training had begun.

Shannon’s grandfather also encouraged her to aspire to higher education. A bright and curious student, high marks came easily to Shannon, but her ascent to university was not to be so straightforward. No one in her family had been to university and her school had few resources to support aspiring college students, so Shannon wasn't pointed in the direction of the scholarships she needed to afford tuition at the prestigious universities she’d been accepted by. At the same time, a chaotic home situation meant that Shannon needed to move out as soon as possible. Unable to save money living with family and with no tuition scholarship, Shannon’s higher education ambitions seemed to be in tatters. But she made the most of the hand she’d been dealt, quickly pivoting to enrol at a two-year community college so she could still study in the evenings while working full time.

With a keen interest in the human condition, Shannon took a philosophy course. She expected it to be easy, but her first ever C came as a shock. “I wasn't used to having to work that hard,” she says. “I struggled my way through the course and was completely indignant, until I grew up enough to later realise that I was the problem and not the subject matter.”

After completing her two years of community college Shannon transferred to a four-year ‘commuter’ university that served many working and first-generation students, what was then California State University, Hayward (now East Bay). But she needed to complete one more philosophy module to fulfil a requirement for her degree. She grudgingly chose Applied Ethics because it was taught near her workplace and took place in the evenings. Shannon’s expectations were low, but she fell in love with the subject in the very first class. “I was absolutely captivated,” she says. “The semester started in August, and I’d changed my major by the first week of October. I thought

This is what I've been looking for all of this time.

She swiftly persuaded her boss to change her hours to accommodate her new class schedule, even though it meant she had to both work and study full time for the final two years of her degree. She had found a way to make her studies possible once again, but some obstacles were trickier to navigate than others. All-male Philosophy departments were not uncommon at the time, and there was a prevailing, mostly unspoken view that men were more suited to the discipline than women. Despite having top marks in the programme, all but one of Shannon’s male professors tried to discourage her from pursuing an academic career, telling her repeatedly that not only were there no jobs for PhD graduates in philosophy, but that being a woman made her even more likely to fail. The lone exception was the professor who had taught her in that first, revelatory Applied Ethics lecture, who encouraged her to keep going.

Her graduation, part act of defiance, was followed by a PhD in Philosophy at Boston College. Her first teaching job was at the University of San Francisco, after which she got a three-year position teaching Philosophy of Science at Santa Clara University (SCU) in California. A Catholic university, SCU’s outlook is informed by the Jesuit perspective, which holds that no human activity in the world is inseparable from human values. This allowed Shannon to pursue lines of enquiry that might have been discouraged at other institutions, such as the role of ethics and values in science.

It was a very comfortable place for me to develop those lines of thinking. Then later, of course, to think about the ethical implications of technology as well.

Shannon had been fascinated by technology since childhood and was keen to think about its role in ethical life, but technology had long been neglected by Philosophy’s focus on the intellectually ‘pure’ domain of reason and theory. By 2006 Shannon was on tenure-track and free to develop her own syllabi, and she decided to teach a module on technology and ethics. In the first class she talked frankly with her students about how moral theory related to their emerging relationships with social media and to the smartphones that were becoming entwined with their lives. There was a great deal of anxiety and confusion about those emerging technologies at the time, and much excitement, and Shannon’s module struck a chord. “The entire class was electrified,” she says. “The lectures and discussions analysed this technology’s profound impact on their sense of identity, which was being shaped at that phase of their lives.”

Inspired by her students’ reaction, Shannon wrote a paper on social media and Aristotle’s virtues and she submitted it to a conference she’d seen advertised called The Good Life in the Technological Age, which was taking place at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. On arrival in Twente she discovered something remarkable: an already thriving community of scholars from around the world who were working in philosophy of technology. Her place in academia suddenly felt clear. “I was having conversations with people after presenting my paper,” she says. “And I had that moment of “Oh, I’m home! I’ve found my people.”

Finding unity and identity in Twente emboldened Shannon to abandon her previous research agenda and dedicate herself to writing about the ethics of emerging technologies and embedding herself in her newfound community. SCU’s campus in Silicon Valley gave Shannon access to the beating heart of the tech world. It was home to the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, which was created by a gift from Apple co-founder Mike Markkula and boasted longstanding connections with the business community. Shannon would lead training sessions for corporate leaders on emerging issues, making ethical considerations relevant and concrete. She even took time out of her academic schedule to work half-time at Google, as a visiting AI Ethicist.

Shannon’s work was making an impact and influencing business practice, but she and her research community were increasingly concerned that their emerging sub-discipline would wither on the vine if they couldn’t engage and cultivate the next generation of researchers. Shannon was also keen to embark upon some large-scale, interdisciplinary research projects, but neither of these ambitions could be achieved at SCU. So the advertised Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) at the University of Edinburgh seemed too good to be true: an opportunity to lead a large research community, interdisciplinary by design, that would also allow her to sustainably mentor PhD students in concert with experts in machine learning, data science and robotics, designers, artists, social scientists, and other philosophers.

Moving to Edinburgh just weeks before the UK went into lockdown was not an ideal start to an exciting new chapter in her career, but Shannon has form when it comes to navigating setbacks, and it’s fair to say that the role and EFI have lived up to her ambitions. At EFI she founded and now directs the Centre for Technomoral Futures, devoted to the unification of technical and moral knowledge in research, design and practice. Among other projects, she has recently been part of an international panel of experts advising the Scottish Government on ethical digital policy, and she is currently co-directing the UKRI-funded £3.5 million BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides) programme with Professor Ewa Luger, in collaboration with the Ada Lovelace Institute, to ensure AI and data are used responsibly and ethically across society and industry. She’s also mentoring a cohort of 12 PhD students and two postdoctoral researchers from across the University’s Schools and departments, ensuring the survival of the next generation of interdisciplinary technology-focused research.

At a time when AI and emerging technologies seem to be causing more problems than they solve, Shannon is not only spearheading the conversation about responsible technology, she’s hopeful too. “I'm far from resigned to allowing the status quo of technological disenchantment to become normalized,” she says. “There's a growing amount of fight in us for a future with technology that's more humane."

We've had technology since we climbed down from the trees, it’s how humans exist and flourish, in part by reconfiguring the built world with our minds and our creativity. Doing without technology is not an option, so we have to find a way to reclaim it.