Artificial intelligence (AI) has generated a staggering amount of hype in the past several years. But is it the game-changer it has been cracked up to be? And, if so, how is it changing the game? John Zerilli's 2021 book, A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence, explores the implications of AI for our lives as citizens across a number of different domains, including political, legal and economic ones. In this conversation with Zerilli, Shannon Vallor, one of the world's leading AI ethicists, explores the interplay between the ethical and the political, the scope of AI ethics, the dangers posed by our increased reliance on AI systems, and much more.

Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Professor in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. Her research explores how emerging technologies reshape human moral and intellectual character, and maps the ethical challenges and opportunities posed by new uses of data and artificial intelligence.

John Zerilli is the Chancellor's Fellow in AI, Data and the Rule of Law at Edinburgh Law School. His research interests include the interplay between cognitive science, artificial intelligence and the law.

John Zerilli (JZ): I am interested in addressing more than just what we would consider to be questions of an ethical nature pertaining to the individual and how they confront moral dilemmas in their own lives. So, my first question is about AI ethics as a discipline, and how it connects to politics. There is this meme that suggests that AI ethics really isn't a very interesting specialization at all, because the questions that pop up are just questions whose answers are uncontroversial. The meme states that, “The ethics of AI is no different from the ethics of a pencil”. The idea is that you shouldn't go around stabbing people with pencils, you shouldn't use pencils to write racist or sexist things, you shouldn't throw pencils at people, and so on. Similarly: don't be racist with AI technologies, don't be sexist, don't write and perpetuate discriminatory stereotypes using AI. Is there anything more to AI ethics than just this sort of bland vision?