Bio / Contact

Brian Christian is a computer scientist, cognitive scientist, and bestselling author whose work explores the human implications of computing.

He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Human-Compatible AI at UC Berkeley and the author of The Alignment Problem, Algorithms to Live By (with Tom Griffiths), and The Most Human Human.

As a researcher

His work spans computational cognitive science and AI alignment, and has appeared in journals from PNAS to Dædalus to Cognitive Science, and at conferences from ICLR to COLM to FAccT to NeurIPS. He completed his PhD at Oxford’s Human Information Processing Lab, supported by the Clarendon Scholarship; his thesis received a Letter of Commendation from the Medical Sciences Division and an examination prize from Lincoln College. His research has been discussed in Nature, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Wired.

As a writer

His books have been translated into nineteen languages, and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and The Paris Review, earning fellowships at Bread Loaf, Yaddo, and MacDowell, publication in Best American Science & Nature Writing, and an award from the Academy of American Poets.

As a developer

His open-source contributions span the Python data-science stack, the Ruby web stack, and Apple’s MLX framework, and his work has shipped on over 100 million Mac computers. He built websites for Fortune 50 companies in the 1990s and 2000s, and from 2013–2022 he served as Director of Technology for the literary publisher McSweeney’s.

As a speaker

He has been a featured guest on The Daily Show, The Ezra Klein Show, and Radiolab, lectured at Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Yale, the Santa Fe Institute, and the London School of Economics, and advised executives, Cabinet members, parliamentarians, and policymakers in six countries and the UN.

Born in Wilmington, Delaware, he studied computer science and philosophy at Brown, poetry and nonfiction at the University of Washington, and cognitive science and machine learning at Oxford. He lives in San Francisco.