Toby Walsh

Toby Walsh (born 1964 in England) is Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and chief scientist of its AI Institute. A decorated researcher in constraint programming and social choice, he became one of the world’s best-known AI public intellectuals through books including “It’s Alive!” (2017), “Machines Behaving Badly: The Morality of AI” (2022), and “Faking It” (2023).

The campaign against killer robots

Walsh’s defining fight is against lethal autonomous weapons. In 2015 he helped launch the open letter — released at the IJCAI conference and eventually signed by tens of thousands of researchers alongside figures like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking — calling for a ban on offensive autonomous weapons. In 2017 he organized a follow-up signed by founders of more than 100 AI and robotics companies urging the United Nations to act, warning that without a ban an arms race in autonomous weapons was inevitable. He has taken that case to the UN in New York and Geneva repeatedly.

Walsh is a nuanced critic rather than a doomer: he champions AI research, dismisses Terminator-style superintelligence panic, and was even briefly banned from Russia after criticizing its use of AI in the Ukraine war. His argument is that specific applications — autonomous killing machines, deceptive systems, unaccountable algorithms — deserve hard legal limits now, precisely so the technology’s benefits survive public trust.