Ayanna Howard’s Rebooting the Machines: A New Human Vision for Artificial Intelligence was released Nov. 10 by Broadleaf Books and has drawn coverage from several outlets. Hypepotamus featured the book the same day in Beyond AI’s Hype and Doom, Spelman’s New President Ayanna Howard Pushes for a Reset. FOX 5 Atlanta interviewed her Nov. 9 about why AI needs a moral compass. US Black Engineer reviewed the book Nov. 6 and quoted Library Journal, which called it “a very timely work on the ethics of artificial intelligence algorithms.”
Howard argues that AI has no built-in moral compass, and that organizations that want it to serve all of humanity must supply one. The book covers how AI will transform jobs rather than eliminate them, the need for students and workers to adapt, and the costs of limited diversity among AI developers. “We need to reboot our relationship with technology, reboot our relationship with AI, and even retrain how we do certain things,” she told Hypepotamus. The book is written for readers in STEM as well as the humanities and creative fields.
The stakes are immediate. AI systems in critical sectors such as health care are rarely trained on data that reflect the full diversity of the human population, and they often underrepresent Black women, leading to unequal outcomes, US Black Engineer reported. “AI is fundamentally connected to physical interaction with the world,” Howard writes, arguing that choices made in the design of digital infrastructures have material consequences for people, communities, and environments. Companies have already put large language models in robots for voice control, and AI-powered drones raise privacy and surveillance concerns. Howard calls for collective action to find and fix biased algorithms before they become embedded in infrastructure.
Howard is the 12th president of Spelman College, a post she took Aug. 1. She was previously dean of engineering at Ohio State University. Earlier, as a senior robotics researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she helped develop technology for Mars rovers. She is the author of Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI and has authored more than 300 publications. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was named to the 2026 Ebony Power 100. All proceeds from the book will go toward scholarships for Spelman students.
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