Wendell Wallach

• 1. Introduction

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  In 2015, Wendell Wallach published a claim that technological development is at risk of becoming a juggernaut beyond human control. The phrase comes from his book A Dangerous Master, which the World Technology Network honored with its media and journalism award that year.

  Wallach was born on the 21st of April, 1946, in Torrington, Connecticut. He is a bioethicist and author. His career has taken him from corporate boardrooms to Yale University to the rooms where international technology policy gets made. The questions that animate his work are substantial ones: can a machine be built to make genuinely ethical decisions? Who decides when technology has grown powerful enough to require oversight? And what does keeping control look like in practice?

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• 2. A Family Forged by Flight

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  Gerda Wilhelmina Lewenz, Wendell Wallach's mother, was born in Berlin on the 7th of April, 1915, during the First World War. Both sides of her family were prominent Jewish bankers. She grew up to become deeply involved in the German peace movement and remained a peace activist for the rest of her life.

  In 1936, Gerda trained as a nurse in Hamburg, where she met and married Dr. Gert M.K. Wallach, also a German Jew. In 1938 and 1939, they separately fled to New York, settling in Goshen. Gert opened a medical practice, served as Director of Health for Goshen, and received a Public Health Award. His career later brought him to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he worked as a health officer and clinician. There he served the Georgia-Tennessee Health Authority, providing care across Appalachia. He later served as Director of Health of Waterbury, Connecticut, a position he held until his death.

  Florence, Italy is where Gerda studied art history. In the United States she owned the Litchfield Gallery and continued curating art shows throughout her life. Before her death on the 12th of October, 2000, Gerda was featured in Letter Without Words. The 1998 PBS film traced her family's story from the First World War through their flight from Nazi Germany.

  Amei Wallach, Wendell's sister, became a filmmaker, art critic, journalist, and author based in New York. H.G. Peter Wallach, who died in 1995, was an author and political scientist specializing in American constitutional law and contemporary German politics. At the family dinner table, Gerda had presided over contests to determine who was the greatest writer, Shakespeare or Goethe. Wendell's own education began at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he received his Bachelor of Arts in 1968.

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• 3. From Divinity to Consulting

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  In 1971, Wallach earned a master's degree in education from Harvard University and also attended Harvard Divinity School. Those two institutions, one practical and one philosophical, pointed toward the dual interests that would shape his later career.

  In India, Wallach spent time exploring spirituality and processes of cognition. In 1978 he published his first book, Silent Learning: The Undistracted Mind, through Journey Publications.

  Farpoint Solutions LLC and Omnia Consulting Inc. were the two firms Wallach founded and led as president in the 1980s and 1990s. Their clients included the State of Connecticut, PepsiCo International, and United Aircraft.

  Wallach lives in Bloomfield, Connecticut, with his wife Nancy. His pursuits outside of professional life include skiing, hiking, and building stained glass windows. In 2001 he sold his interests in both consulting firms, ending two decades inside the technology industry he would later analyze.

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• 4. The First Moral Machines

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  In 2004 and 2005, Wallach taught undergraduate seminars at Yale University on the ethics of robots. In 2005, he became chair of the Technology and Ethics Study Group at Yale's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics.

  In 2009, Wallach and Colin Allen of Indiana University published Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong. The book's abstract described it as "the first book to examine the challenge of building artificial moral agents." That same year, Wallach appeared at the Woodstock Film Festival on a panel titled "Redesigning Humanity," alongside Ray Kurzweil and Martine Rothblatt.

  In February 2010, Wallach appeared in Honda Dreams: Living With Robots, a film directed by Joe Berlinger that debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2013, he gave a TEDx talk at the University of Connecticut titled "Emerging Technology - Hype vs. Reality." In 2014, The Atlantic featured him in an article about the military's interest in teaching robots right from wrong.

  Wallach also edited the Library of Essays on Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He co-edited a volume on robot ethics and machine ethics with Peter Asaro, and a volume on emerging technologies, ethics, law, and governance with Gary Marchant. In 2014, the World Technology Network gave him its ethics award.

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• 5. A Dangerous Master

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  In 2015, the Future of Life Institute awarded Wallach a grant. The project was titled "Control and Responsible Innovation in the Development of Autonomous Machines." That same year, he became a senior advisor on synthetic biology to The Hastings Center. The Hastings Center is an independent, nonpartisan, interdisciplinary research institute focused on social and ethical issues in health care, science, and technology.

  A Dangerous Master proposed what Wallach called "solutions for regaining control of our technological destiny." In the book, he credited his Yale colleague Joel Marks with raising an unexpected concern. Marks had impressed upon Wallach the issue of planetary defense against impact events from space. Sentient Publications republished the book in 2024, adding a new preface and new examples.

  Business Insider featured Wallach in 2015 in an article about the argument that technology was destroying more jobs than it was creating. In 2016, The Washington Post published his review of John Markoff's book Machines of Loving Grace. In the same review, he also addressed Our Robots, Ourselves by David A. Mindell and We, Robots by Curtis White.

  Wallach received a Fulbright Scholarship as Visiting Research Chair at the University of Ottawa for 2015-2016. In 2018, Santa Clara University named him the Distinguished Austin J. Fagothey Visiting Professor.

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• 6. Global Governance

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  Wallach's 2016 testimony at the United Nations Third Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons addressed a question that weapons designers had long set aside. Increasing autonomy and machine learning, he told delegates, can boost a system's accuracy on specific tasks while raising its overall unpredictability. Risk rises relative to the power of the munitions a system can discharge.

  The World Economic Forum appointed Wallach to co-chair its Global Future Council on Technology, Values, and Policy for the 2016-2018 term. He then served on the WEF's AI council from 2018 to 2020. In 2016, he joined Lee Sedol on a WEF panel to discuss the significance of AlphaGo. In 2017, he spoke at Davos on a WEF panel about driverless cars alongside Violeta Bulc, Carlos Ghosn, and Paul Jacobs. In 2017, he also appeared on an AI ethics panel with Stuart Russell, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Max Tegmark.

  In 2019, Wallach served on the UN Global Pulse Expert Group on Governance and Data of AI. That group called for responsible development of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies to help achieve the UN's 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. He also advised the UN Secretary-General's Higher-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation. The panel cited him in its 2019 report titled "The Age of Digital Interdependence."

  Wallach organized an International Congress for the Governance of AI, originally planned to meet in Prague in 2020. COVID-19 forced the event online; the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs hosted the sessions in 2021. The goal was to create a Global Governance Network for AI, known as GGN-AI. From 2020 to 2024, Wallach served as a Carnegie-Uehiro Fellow at the Carnegie Council. There he co-directed the Artificial Intelligence and Equality Initiative with Anja Kaspersen. Their podcast brought in guests including Angela Kane, former UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs and Under-Secretary-General for Management. Other guests included David Chalmers, a philosopher of consciousness at New York University. In 2025, Wallach appeared on MSNBC, interviewed by Ayman Mohyeldin about the techno-industrial complex. That same year, he was also a guest on George Bandarian's podcast, discussing how large technology companies are shaping the future of artificial intelligence.

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