ΑΙhub.org
 

The Good Robot Podcast: Featuring Shannon Vallor


by
13 March 2024



share this:
Space scene with words Good Robot Podcast

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. In this episode, Shannon Vallor talks about feminist care ethics, techno-virtues and vices, and the ‘AI Mirror’.

Shannon Vallor on feminist care ethics, techno-virtues and vices, and the ‘AI Mirror’

In this episode we chat to Shannon Vallor, the Baillie Gifford professor in the ethics and data of AI at the University of Edinburgh and the Director for the Centre for Technomoral Futures. We talk about feminist care ethics; technologies, vices and virtues; why Aristotle believed that the people who make technology should be excluded from citizenship; and why we still don’t have the kinds of robots that we imagined that we’d have in the early 2000s. We also discuss Shannon’s new book, The AI Mirror, which is now available for pre-order.

Listen to the episode here:

Professor 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 is Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures in EFI, and co-Director of the BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides) programme, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Professor Vallor’s research explores how new technologies, especially AI, robotics, and data science, reshape human moral character, habits, and practices. Her work includes advising policymakers and industry on the ethical design and use of AI. She is a standing member of the One Hundred Year Study of Artificial Intelligence (AI100) and a member of the Oversight Board of the Ada Lovelace Institute. Professor Vallor received the 2015 World Technology Award in Ethics from the World Technology Network and the 2022 Covey Award from the International Association of Computing and Philosophy. She is a former Visiting Researcher and AI Ethicist at Google.

Find the episode reading list here.

About The Good Robot Podcast

Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry Mackereth are Research Associates at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where they work on the Mercator-Stiflung funded project on Desirable Digitalisation. Previously, they were Christina Gaw Postdoctoral Researchers in Gender and Technology at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies. During the COVID-19 pandemic they decided to co-found The Good Robot Podcast to explore the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology.




The Good Robot Podcast

            AIhub is supported by:



Subscribe to AIhub newsletter on substack



Related posts :

The Good Robot podcast: what makes a drone “good”? with Beryl Pong

  20 Feb 2026
In this episode, Eleanor and Kerry talk to Beryl Pong about what it means to think about drones as “good” or “ethical” technologies.

Relational neurosymbolic Markov models

and   19 Feb 2026
Relational neurosymbolic Markov models make deep sequential models logically consistent, intervenable and generalisable

AI enables a Who’s Who of brown bears in Alaska

  18 Feb 2026
A team of scientists from EPFL and Alaska Pacific University has developed an AI program that can recognize individual bears in the wild, despite the substantial changes that occur in their appearance over the summer season.

Learning to see the physical world: an interview with Jiajun Wu

and   17 Feb 2026
Winner of the 2019 AAAI / ACM SIGAI dissertation award tells us about his current research.

3 Questions: Using AI to help Olympic skaters land a quint

  16 Feb 2026
Researchers are applying AI technologies to help figure skaters improve. They also have thoughts on whether five-rotation jumps are humanly possible.

AAAI presidential panel – AI and sustainability

  13 Feb 2026
Watch the next discussion based on sustainability, one of the topics covered in the AAAI Future of AI Research report.

How can robots acquire skills through interactions with the physical world? An interview with Jiaheng Hu

  12 Feb 2026
Find out more about work published at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL).

From Visual Question Answering to multimodal learning: an interview with Aishwarya Agrawal

and   11 Feb 2026
We hear from Aishwarya about research that received a 2019 AAAI / ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award honourable mention.



AIhub is supported by:







Subscribe to AIhub newsletter on substack




 















©2026.02 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence