Michael Wooldridge

Michael Wooldridge (born 1966) is a British computer scientist and Ashall Professor of the Foundations of AI at the University of Oxford. One of the founders of the field of multi-agent systems, he has spent more than three decades on AI research and written it up for the public in books including “The Road to Conscious Machines” (2020) and “A Brief History of AI” (2021). In December 2023 he delivered the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures — the storied series begun by Michael Faraday in 1825 — on the truth about AI, bringing chatbots and robots to the same stage where two centuries of science had been explained to children.

Against the Terminator narrative

Wooldridge’s public role has been that of the field’s calm explainer: he considers existential AI fears speculative, argues the killer-robot storyline is deeply implausible, and complains that it crowds out the conversations that matter. Telling Fox News in 2023 that he does not lose sleep over AI, he pointed instead to concrete, present-tense dangers — bias, misinformation, and above all AI in the workplace.

The tools he meant were AI bosses: systems that read employees’ emails, score their productivity, and recommend who to fire. That combination — enthusiasm for the science, scorn for the apocalypse, sharp warnings about mundane misuse — has made him a fixture of British AI coverage and a counterweight to doom-inflected voices like Geoffrey Hinton.