PERSON

Michael Wooldridge

The Oxford computer scientist who has worked in AI since its lean years, built the foundational theory of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems, and spent his public career insisting—with the authority of someone who built the machines—that the field’s most seductive claims are, from a technical point of view, garbage.

Most of the people writing about artificial intelligence for a general audience are not the people who build it. Michael Wooldridge is the rare exception: he has been an AI researcher since the late 1980s, entered the field at the bottom of one of its periodic depressions, and has been present through the entire arc—the long lean years, the slow rebuilding, the current surge of capability and attention that has made AI the dominant technological story of the age. When he writes that much of what is published about AI in the popular press is, from a technical point of view, garbage, he is not being contemptuous. He is reporting from the laboratory. He has seen the field overpromise and underdeliver so many times that he can recognize the pattern from a great distance, and his greatest service to the public is to insist on the

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