Joanna J Bryson
Joanna J Bryson has been Professor of Ethics and Technology at Hertie School, Berlin since February 2020. She is globally recognised for expertise in intelligence broadly, including AI policy and impacts. Her original academic focus was behavioural ecology, using AI for scientific simulations of intelligence. During her PhD on systems engineering of AI, she observed the confusion generated by anthropomorphised AI, leading to her first ethics publication “Just Another Artifact” in 1998. In 2010 her work in AI ethics was first recognised by a policy body when she was invited to participate in the UK research councils’ Robot Ethics retreat, where she coauthored the UK’s (EPSRC/AHRC) “Principles of Robotics,” the world’s first national-level AI ethics soft policy. Her present research focus is the impact of intelligent technology on economies, security, and human cooperation. She also studies transparency for and through AI systems, technological impacts on power, interference in democratic regulation, the future of labour, redistribution, and digital governance more broadly.
She consults frequently on policy and science including to government entities in Germany, the UK, the EU (EP/EC), US, Singapore, Switzerland, and Canada; transnational organisations including Unesco, the UN, OSCE, OECD, CoE, EuroMed; NGOs such as the Red Cross, Chatham House, IEEE, WEF. In 2020, Germany nominated her to the Global Partnership of AI, where she chaired an AI Governance committee. She holds two degrees each in psychology (BA Chicago & MPhil Edinburgh) and AI (MSc Edinburgh & PhD MIT). From 2002-2019 she was Computer Science faculty at the University of Bath, where she founded and led their AI research group; she has also held postdoctoral, sabbatical, or visiting positions at Harvard (Psychology), Oxford (Anthropology) Nottingham and Mannheim (Social Science), The Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, and the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy.