Vincent C. Müller

Vincent C. Müller occupies a position in the philosophy of artificial intelligence that almost no one else holds: at once a careful analytic philosopher of mind, concerned with whether computation can ground meaning and whether the brain is a kind of computer, and a public scholar of risk who sat down with Nick Bostrom in 2012 and asked the world’s leading AI researchers a deceptively simple question. When do you expect human-level machine intelligence, and what do you think happens after? The answer he gathered—a median expectation of about fifty percent probability by 2040–2050, rising to ninety percent by 2075, and roughly one in three chance the long-term result would be bad or catastrophic—became one of the most cited empirical facts in the entire debate about existential risk. He did not editorialize. He counted. That instinct, to clarify rather than to prophesy, runs through everything Müller has written: he authored the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on the ethics of AI