Carnegie-Uehiro Fellow, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. Former Chair, Technology and Ethics Studies, Yale University Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. Co-Director, Artificial Intelligence and Equality Initiative (AIEI).
Wendell Wallach is one of the world's leading voices on the ethics and governance of emerging technologies. For over a decade, he chaired the Technology and Ethics group at Yale University's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, where he guided interdisciplinary research on AI, robotics, and neuroscience. He also served as a Carnegie-Uehiro Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, where he co-directed the Artificial Intelligence and Equality Initiative, an effort to ensure that AI development supports global justice, rights, and wellbeing.
Wendell is the co-author of "Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong," a foundational book that helped define the field of machine ethics. His follow-up, "A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology From Slipping Beyond Our Control," offers a sharp warning about unchecked tech development and how society must govern high-risk systems. He has advised institutions including The Hastings Center, IEEE, the World Economic Forum, and NASA. A frequent speaker at the United Nations and global policy forums, Wendell has earned recognition as a "godfather of AI ethics." His work helps bridge the gap between abstract ethical debates and real-world decision-making.
Wallach opened with a question he has posed to audiences for years: will the positive impacts of AI outweigh the negative? His answer was neither optimistic nor pessimistic. AI is not one thing but a collection of complex socio-technical systems that amplify and accelerate everything, benefits and risks alike. The key variable is not the technology itself but the quality of human choices about how it is implemented and governed.
He argued that the root challenge is bounded human morality. Greed, fear, ignorance, and cognitive bias are not flaws AI can fix; they are the problems AI magnifies. Governance, from corporate policy to international treaty, must create structures that compensate for these limits. This means responsible implementation at every stage of the lifecycle: education of the people who will work with a system, ongoing oversight, appropriate guardrails, clear mechanisms for detecting when something goes wrong, and real shutdown mechanisms.
The third lesson addressed the path forward at the international level. Wallach has long advocated for soft-law mechanisms, observatories, and collective-action forums that can move faster than traditional regulation. He described efforts like the International Congress for the Governance of AI and the lessons learned from arms control diplomacy. His practical message: do not buy into either the hype or the despair; instead, build the coalitions and institutions that allow humanity to steer rather than be steered.
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