Professor Stuart Russell on AI, AGI, Education, Consciousness & The Future of Humanity

Stuart J. Russell is professor (and formerly chair) of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley. He is holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering and director of the Centre for Human-Compatible AI. His book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach is the standard text in AI; it has been translated into 14 languages and is used in over 1,400 universities in 128 countries. Stuart also works for the United Nations, developing a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty. He is an honorary fellow of Wadham College, Oxford; distinguished fellow of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI; and fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award of the National Science Foundation, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, the World Technology Award (Policy category), the Mitchell Prize of the American Statistical Association, the Feigenbaum Prize of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and Outstanding Educator Awards from both ACM and AAAI. He received his B.A. with first-class honours in physics from Oxford University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford in 1986.