PERSON

Toby Walsh

The computer scientist who spent thirty years building AI from the inside—proving theorems in constraint programming, writing the field's defining handbooks—and then looked up from the bench and organized the campaign to ban autonomous weapons before they are built.

Toby Walsh occupies an unusual position in the landscape of serious AI commentary: he is neither a philosopher arriving from outside to ask what the machines might mean, nor a founder selling a vision he hopes to profit from. He is a working scientist who built the technology from the inside—spending his career on constraint programming and propositional satisfiability, the unglamorous engine rooms of automated reasoning—and then concluded that someone with his knowledge had an obligation to speak plainly about where the technology was going and what it might cost. Walsh is Laureate Fellow and Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales and Chief Scientist of UNSW.ai; his scientific reputation was built on editing the field's defining handbooks and chairing its largest conference. His public reputation was built on organizing open letters, signed by tens of thousands of researchers, calling for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons—for which he was placed on a

Keep reading with YOU ON AI