PERSON
John Danaher
The Irish philosopher who refuses both techno-optimism and techno-pessimism—arguing that work is structurally bad and automation could free us to flourish, that machines may deserve moral concern far sooner than we admit, and that the future of the AI age is not a fate to be awaited but a project to be chosen.
John Danaher belongs to a rare species: a careful analyst who takes the utopian possibility seriously precisely because he has looked clearly at how bad the present arrangement already is, and who takes the dystopian risk seriously precisely because he refuses to let optimism do his thinking for him. Trained in law at University College Cork and Trinity College Dublin and for many years a senior lecturer at the University of Galway, he has built a body of work that ranges across the ethics of automation, the moral status of robots, the future of intimate relationships, and the systematic study of how human values themselves change under technological pressure. His central arguments are bracing in the best sense: work, as currently organized, is
structurally bad for most people and its automation could be a liberation rather than a catastrophe; artificial agents may cross