Brian Christian
Brian Christian is an acclaimed author and researcher whose work explores the human implications of computer science. He is best known for his bestselling series of books on artificial intelligence and humanity.
His most recent release, The Alignment Problem, is a nuanced investigation of the ethics and safety challenges confronting the field of AI and a portrait of the community of researchers working to address them. Upon its release, New York Times called it “the best book on the key technical and moral questions of AI.” Years later, the New York Times included it at the top of its list of the “5 Best Books About Artificial Intelligence,” saying “If you’re going to read one book on artificial intelligence, this is the one.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella named it one of the five books that inspired him in 2021. The Alignment Problem was a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Best Science & Technology Book of the Year and won the Excellence in Science Communication Award from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Algorithms to Live By, with Tom Griffiths, applies computational principles to everyday human decision making, painting a counterintuitively human picture of rationality. It was named a #1 Audible bestseller, an Amazon best science book of the year, and an MIT Technology Review Best Book of the Year.
In The Most Human Human, Brian uses his experience as a human "confederate" in the Turing test to examine what chatbots reveal about the nature of language and communication. It was named a Wall Street Journal bestseller, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a New Yorker favorite book of the year.
Christian’s writing has been translated into nineteen languages, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and in scientific journals such as Cognitive Science. His work has won several literary awards, including fellowships at Bread Loaf, Yaddo, and MacDowell, publication in Best American Science & Nature Writing, and an award from the Academy of American Poets.
Christian has been a featured guest on The Daily Show, The Ezra Klein Show, and Radiolab, and has lectured at Google, Meta, Microsoft, Yale, the Santa Fe Institute, and the London School of Economics. He has advised business executives as well as Cabinet Members, Parliamentarians, and administrators in five countries about matters ranging from decision making to AI.
Born in Wilmington, Delaware, Christian holds degrees in philosophy, computer science, and poetry from Brown University and the University of Washington. A visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and a Clarendon Scholar at the University of Oxford, he lives in San Francisco and the UK.
Topics
The AI Alignment Problem
In the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning, the alignment problem refers to the challenge of getting AI systems to exhibit human values and perform duties according to societal norms. If a self-driving car is programmed to reach its destination as quickly as possible, but does so by speeding, running red lights, and mowing down pedestrians, you’ve got yourself an alignment problem. How do we solve this, especially when AI is often described as a “black box” where we see the input and the output but don’t quite understand how or what happens in between? Even if we could reliably program human values into AI systems, who decides what those values are? What political, religious, and cultural views would be the basis of right and wrong? In this talk based on his bestselling book by the same name, Brian Christian digs deep into the issues with AI alignment and assesses how we can solve them before it’s too late.
The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive
“Can machines think?” So begins Alan Turing’s legendary 1950 paper on machine intelligence in which he proposes a practical experiment – the Turing test – for telling the difference. A panel of judges talks via text message with two parties, one human and the other a machine, and attempts to tell which is which. Turing predicted that in the 21st century we would come to a point at which many of us would be unable to tell the difference. As AI technology increasingly permeates society and the gap between humans and machines continues to narrow, a look at both the history of the Turing test, and the present-day bots that compete in it, offers us a counterintuitive lesson: far from being a threat to our humanity, AI is teaching us, more than ever, who we are.
Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades. And the solutions they've found have much to teach us. In a dazzlingly interdisciplinary talk, Brian Christian shows how the simple, precise algorithms used by computers can also untangle very human questions. He explains how to have better hunches and when to leave things to chance, how to deal with overwhelming choices and how best to connect with others. From finding a spouse to finding a parking spot, from organising one's inbox to understanding the workings of human memory, he transforms the wisdom of computer science into strategies for human living
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