Stuart Russell

There are people who build things and people who wonder whether those things should be built. Stuart Russell does both. This British computer scientist, born in Portsmouth in 1962, is perhaps the mind that has most defined how artificial intelligence is taught around the world. His book "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" (AIMA), co-written with Peter Norvig in 1995 and now in its fourth edition, is used in more than 1,500 universities across 135 countries and has accumulated over 59,000 academic citations. If someone ever explained AI to you in a classroom, they likely learned how to teach it from that book.

But what makes Russell singular is not only the book: it is that when the field he helped create started running too fast, he was one of the first to raise his hand. From the University of California, Berkeley, where he directs the Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI), he has spent years arguing that today's AI systems have a foundational flaw: they are designed to optimize fixed objectives, and an AI that optimizes without fully understanding human values can do things we do not want. His book "Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control" (2019) explains this problem with a clarity rarely seen in academia: accessible to any reader, without sacrificing rigor.

The recognition for his career is long and varied. Russell received the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, the ACM Allen Newell Award, the AAAI Feigenbaum Prize, and the ACM Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, among others. In 2021 he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to AI research. In 2025 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, one of the most prestigious scientific honors in the world, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford (1986) and studied physics at Oxford, giving him a perspective that crosses disciplines in an uncommon way.

To me, what makes Russell admirable is his willingness to make the field that made him famous uncomfortable. He did not stay quiet enjoying the awards: he continues to appear in conference halls and in the media arguing that we need to build AI differently from the ground up. That is rare. Every time you use Claude or any other responsibly built AI tool, there is a little of that uncomfortable conversation Russell started, pushing from underneath. We have not yet solved the problem he points to, but at least we are looking at it directly.