Minds, Mirrors and Gods: Decoding Our Humanity in the AI Revolution

Shannon Vallor, Baillie Gifford Professor in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence and Director of the Edinburgh Futures Institute’s Centre for Technomoral Futures at the University of Edinburgh, delivers a talk as part of WMUx's AI@WMU event series.

Beginning with the example of the AI chatbot, this talk demystifies the gap between AI tools and human minds by explaining the difference between a mirror image and the reality it reflects. Using the mirror metaphor, the talk outlines how the reflective capacity of AI tools explains both their power and their perils. Most importantly, by reproducing the historical patterns of injustice and shortsightedness found in our data, AI mirrors push humanity’s past failures into our future, ensuring that we make the same mistakes, only at ever greater scales. The talk ends by reflecting on how we can reclaim our shared humanity from the AI mirror illusion, as we stand on the brink of an unsustainable past that urgently commands our power to change. Register for meeting link.

Co-sponsors: WMUx Office of Faculty Development, Department of Philosophy.