Stuart J. Russell
British computer scientist and author (born 1962)
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Through Artificial intelligence, Physics and Computer science
Education and early life
Russell was born in Portsmouth, England, and attended St Paul's School, London. He studied physics at Wadham College, Oxford, and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree with first-class honours in 1982. He moved to the United States to complete a PhD in computer science at Stanford University in 1986 for research on inductive reasoning and analogical reasoning supervised by Michael Genesereth. The PhD was supported by a NATO studentship from the UK Science and Engineering Research Council.
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Career and research
He then joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley as a professor of computer science. From 2008 to 2011 he also held an appointment as adjunct professor of Neurological Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, where he pursued research in computational physiology and intensive-care unit monitoring. He is also an Honorary Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford. His research in the area of artificial intelligence includes contributions to machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision making, multitarget tracking, computer vision, and inverse reinforcement learning. He has also been an active participant in the movement to ban the manufacture and use of autonomous weapons.
In 2016, he founded the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence at UC Berkeley, with co-principal investigators Pieter Abbeel, Anca Dragan, Tom Griffiths, Bart Selman, Joseph Halpern, Michael Wellman and Satinder Singh Baveja. Russell has published several hundred conference and journal articles as well as several books, including The Use of Knowledge in Analogy and Induction and Do the Right Thing: Studies in Limited Rationality (with Eric Wefald). He and Peter Norvig were the authors of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, a textbook used by over 1,500 universities in 135 countries. He is on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Future of Life Institute and the advisory board of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.
In 2017 he collaborated with the Future of Life Institute to produce a video, Slaughterbots, about swarms of drones assassinating political opponents, and presented this to a United Nations meeting about the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
In 2018 he contributed an interview to the documentary Do You Trust This Computer?.
His book, Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, was published by Viking on 8 October 2019. His work is aligned with Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence themes. His former doctoral students include Marie desJardins, Eric Xing and Shlomo Zilberstein.
Russell gave the 2021 Reith Lectures, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, on Living with Artificial Intelligence with lectures on "The Biggest Event in Human History", "AI in warfare", "AI in the economy" and "AI: A Future for Humans".
Along with other leading AI scientists including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Max Tegmark, Russell signed several open letters about the dangers of AI, including the open letter from the Future of Life Institute calling for "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4", the Statement on Superintelligence, calling for "a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is 1. broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and 2. strong public buy-in.", signed by over 130,000 individuals, and the Statement on AI Extinction Risk, stating that "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.". In a January 2025 article in Newsweek, Russell wrote "In other words, the AGI race is a race towards the edge of a cliff."