Short answers, pulled from the story.
Brian Christian has written three major nonfiction books: The Most Human Human (2011), Algorithms to Live By (2016, co-written with Tom Griffiths), and The Alignment Problem (2020). In 2025 he also wrote the introduction to the 75th anniversary edition of Norbert Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings.
Brian Christian holds a degree in computer science and philosophy from Brown University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. In 2023 he was awarded a Clarendon Scholarship to pursue a doctorate in experimental psychology at Lincoln College, University of Oxford.
The Most Human Human is based on Christian's experience competing in the 2009 Loebner Prize, where he tried to appear more convincingly human than other human participants in a contest against chatbots. The book became a Wall Street Journal best-seller and an editors' choice at The New York Times. It inspired the Pulitzer Prize finalist play Marjorie Prime and Peter Brown's book series The Wild Robot, which was adapted into a 2024 film.
The Alignment Problem, published in 2020, examines the rise of ethics and safety concerns in machine learning through historical research and interviews with approximately 100 researchers. The New York Times named it one of the five best books about artificial intelligence in 2024, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella cited it as one of the five books that inspired him in 2021.
Beginning in 2012, Brian Christian has been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, affiliated with groups including the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence and the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences. His research focuses on computational cognitive science, AI alignment, reinforcement learning from human feedback, and how reward models operationalize human preferences.
Brian Christian has an Erdos number of 3, meaning he is connected to mathematician Paul Erdos through a chain of three co-authorship links.