Rebooting the Machines: A New Human Vision for Artificial Intelligence
Ayanna HowardPresident, Spelman CollegeA New Human Vision for Artificial Intelligence
In her groundbreaking new book, Dr. Ayanna Howard argues that AI, including robotics, is not built with a moral center. That means that if we want it to serve all humanity, we must provide the compass.
In this call to action around the moral and ethical questions surrounding AI, Dr. Howard offers the big ideas and practical suggestions needed to shape AI toward a moral and ethical role in the world. Most AI developers aren't trained ethicists and don't always think about the consequences of their creations. Thus, it is up to us all to think deeply about what we value as humans, what we want to accept as good (or good enough) choices in technology's interactions with us, and to educate ourselves to ensure those values, the moral center, are programmed into AI.
About Ayanna Howard
At 27, Ayanna Howard was hired by NASA to lead a team designing a robot for future Mars exploration missions that could "think like a human and adapt to change." She went on to lead engineers and scientists working on the next generation of Mars rovers at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, chair the computing department at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and co-found Zyrobotics, an ed-tech company whose STEM education and therapy products are designed for children with special needs. She became the first woman to lead the 10,000-student College of Engineering at The Ohio State University, and in August 2026 she became the 12th president of Spelman College.
Howard's work spans more than 300 peer-reviewed publications and has made her a foremost authority on human emotion-centered robotic design. Her message to leaders is direct: AI stands to improve health care, education, manufacturing and remote work, but only if it is built to be trusted. "The only way to prevent biases from seeping into the development of technologies is to ensure they are created with diversity of thought," she says. Homogeneous teams build biased products; diverse ones broaden an organization's reach. On oversight she is blunt: "Unregulated AI is just as dangerous as unregulated pharmaceuticals."
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