With summer fast approaching, the University of Minnesota’s Artificial Community of Practice is getting our beach reading lists ready. At the top of the stack of titles is Shannon Vallor’s The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking.
The book synopsis:
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. Vallor calls us to rethink what AI is and can be, and what we want to be with it.
With this excitement, we are happy to announce a summer book club on the title! This group is open to all University of Minnesota staff and faculty. All meetings will be conducted via zoom.
The “AI Mirror…” comes out on June 3, 2024, and is available in e-book and hard-cover. You can preorder your copy from the Oxford University Press website for shipment in May. Electronic copies will also be available through the UMN and UMD libraries; links to the electronic texts will be available soon after June 3.
How to Participate
- Complete our form. This will provide a contact point for links, questions, and the calendar invites for our first meeting on June 10.
- After June 3, read and explore the title!
- Our reading process is sincere but not too serious. We recommend that participants read the introductory chapter (about 15 pages) for the first meeting.
- It’s OK not to finish the reading and be a listener and participate at your level of comfort.
- Gather together! Our first meeting is tentatively scheduled for June 10 at noon central. We’ll work with about two chapters per session and meet via Zoom. When you attend the Zoom meeting, change your background to something summery.
About the Author
Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Professor in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, where she directs the Centre for Technomoral Futures in the Edinburgh Futures Institute. She is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and former AI Ethicist at Google. Her work explores how new technologies reshape human moral and intellectual character and includes advising government and industry on the ethical design and use of AI. She is the author of Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (Oxford, 2016).
Sponsors
The Summer AI Book Club is supported by the staff and faculty of:
- UMD Department of Geography & Philosophy
- UMD ITSS Academic Technology and Course Design
- UMTC Writing Across Curriculum
- The Kathryn A. Martin Library at UMD
- The University of Minnesota Libraries
- UMN Academic Technology Support Services
- The UMN AI Community of Practice
Questions and Accommodations
Questions and disability-related accommodations? Please contact [email protected] for more information.