A new article in The Scotsman quotes Luciano Floridi's & Shannon Vallor's letters of support for us
I want to thank Luciano Floridi (Yale) and Shannon Vallor (Edinburgh), who each wrote to the University of Dundee's senior management and Senate in support of the Philosophy programme, and who both addressed our counter-proposal for a Philosophy and AI degree pathway. Passages from their letters were quoted in The Scotsman today:
“Professor Shannon Vallor is Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. She backed calls for Dundee University to develop a new degree in Philosophy and AI, rather than scrap the existing provision.
Prof Vallor described the subject as “critical to the safe development, successful adoption and responsible deployment of artificial intelligence”.
The academic said: “Philosophical training is recognised by leading AI companies themselves, who seek to hire philosophers to work on frontier research questions in AI safety and security, responsible AI governance, moral and legal responsibility for autonomous agents, and the nature of machine cognition.
“The proposed new degree pathway in Philosophy and AI at the University of Dundee is a far more pragmatic and forward-thinking response to the changing needs of society and the economy than closing off Dundee students’ opportunities to concentrate their studies on the knowledge, skills, capacities and habits of mind those needs most clearly reflect.
“The former would put Dundee and its graduates at the leading edge of Scotland’s readiness and capability for a world transformed by machine intelligence.”
Professor Luciano Floridi, an eminent philosopher and founder of the Digital Ethics Centre at Yale University in the US, also gave his support.
In an appeal to Dundee University’s management, he said: “For most of my career I have argued that digital technologies do not merely carry content or make existing tasks easier: they re-engineer the environment in which we live and, in doing so, alter what we ourselves are.
“That argument found few takers when I began making it.
“It is now the working assumption of the governments and companies that seek my advice.
“I rehearse it here because Dundee proposes to close one of the places in Scotland where students are trained to think about digital technology in exactly these terms.”
Prof Floridi said companies are no longer merely designing technology but are creating agents that “act, advise, refuse, and are addressed daily by people who take their answers seriously”.
The response to this is not one for engineers, he added, but for philosophers.
“The route Dundee offers has demonstrably produced the profile that AI labs are now seeking,” he added, “And the Scottish government said so in a national strategy [Scotland's Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2026–2031] months before the Faculty proposed closing it.
“It is an unusual sequence: to receive that form of external recognition and then to withdraw the thing recognised.”
Mic drop.