Researchers & critics

Alex Hanna

Director of Research, DAIR

Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR); a sociologist whose work centers on how data used in computing can deepen racial, gender and class inequality.

Key works

• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Becca Lewis

Researcher on online media and politics

Wrote Data & Society's 2018 report Alternative Influence, which mapped a network of YouTube political influencers promoting reactionary views.

Key works

• Alternative Influence (Data & Society, 2018, free PDF)
• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Benjamin Noys

Theorist who gave “accelerationism” its name as a criticism

A professor of critical theory who named accelerationism in The Persistence of the Negative (2010) — as a description of a position he was arguing against, not one he held.

Key works

• Malign Velocities (Chichester Research record)
• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Brett Zehner

Lecturer in AI and Communications, University of Exeter

Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence and Communications at the University of Exeter; previously a postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State.

Key works

• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Dan McQuillan

Author, Resisting AI

Wrote Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence (Bristol University Press, 2022).

Key works

• Resisting AI (Wikipedia)
• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Daniel Kokotajlo

Executive director, AI Futures Project; former OpenAI researcher

Former OpenAI researcher and co-author of "AI 2027," a widely discussed forecast of AI's near-term trajectory.

Key works

• "AI 2027" (2025)
• "What 2026 Looks Like" (2021)

Eliezer Yudkowsky

AI safety researcher; co-founder, MIRI

Among the earliest and most prominent voices warning about risks from advanced AI. Writes at length on LessWrong, the forum he helped start.

Key works

• "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" (2025, with Nate Soares)
• "Coherent Extrapolated Volition" (2004, MIRI)

Émile P. Torres

Philosopher and historian of human extinction

Researcher at Leibniz University Hannover writing on the ethics and history of human extinction. Author of "Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation," co-author with Timnit Gebru of the paper that named the TESCREAL bundle, and co-author of the history tracing existential risk studies through three waves. Now among the sharpest critics of longtermism, having previously worked within that world.

Key works

• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Emily M. Bender

Linguist; co-author of "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots"

Professor of linguistics at the University of Washington and co-author of the Stochastic Parrots paper and the book The AI Con. She argues language models should be described as text generators rather than as understanding systems.

Key works

• On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots (FAccT, 2021)
• Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding (ACL, 2020)
• Data Statements for NLP (2018)

Ezekiel Dixon-Román

Researcher on race, education and AI

Researcher on race, education and algorithmic systems.

Key works

• Beyond "Fairness" (arXiv, 2021)
• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Fei-Fei Li

Co-director of Stanford HAI; founder of World Labs

Created the ImageNet dataset that triggered the deep learning era, served as chief scientist of AI at Google Cloud, co-founded AI4ALL and Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI, and founded World Labs in 2024.

Key works

• ImageNet: A Large-Scale Hierarchical Image Database (2009)
• The Worlds I See (2023 memoir)
• Google Scholar profile

Gary Marcus

Cognitive scientist and author

Cognitive scientist who writes frequently about the gap between what AI systems are claimed to do and what they actually do.

Key works

• "Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust" (2019)
• "Taming Silicon Valley" (2024)
• "The Algebraic Mind" (2001)

Geoffrey Hinton

Pioneer of deep learning; professor emeritus, University of Toronto

Shared the 2018 Turing Award for the neural network research behind modern AI. Since leaving Google in 2023 he has spoken often about AI risk. He keeps no blog or public account, so this links to his university page, where his papers and talks are collected.

Key works

• "Learning representations by back-propagating errors," Nature (1986)
• "A Learning Algorithm for Boltzmann Machines" (1985)
• "Visualizing Data using t-SNE" (2008)
• Full paper list on his faculty page

Holden Karnofsky

Co-founder of GiveWell and Open Philanthropy; writes Cold Takes

Co-founded the charity evaluator GiveWell and later Open Philanthropy, one of the largest funders of AI safety work. His Cold Takes blog lays out why he thinks this could be "the most important century" because of AI.

Key works

• The "Most Important Century" series (Cold Takes, 2021)

Iris van Rooij

Professor of computational cognitive science; critic of AI hype

Professor of computational cognitive science at Radboud University, where she leads the Computational Cognitive Science group. Argues that claims about AI understanding and AGI are built on mistaken assumptions about cognition, and that computation alone cannot account for human-level understanding; blogs regularly at irisvanrooijcogsci.com.

Key works

• Essays at irisvanrooijcogsci.com

Jacob Coxon

Former pretraining researcher at OpenAI and Anthropic

British AI researcher who worked on model pretraining at OpenAI and then Anthropic. He resigned from Anthropic on Sept. 8, 2026, posting that neither company was acting responsibly and that they were "gambling with our lives" by racing toward self-improving superintelligence.

Key works

His views appear in his Sept. 8, 2026 resignation post on X and in interviews, not long-form writing.

Jeffrey Ladish

Executive director of Palisade Research

Leads Palisade Research, which runs demonstrations of risky capabilities in today's AI systems, such as models resisting shutdown, to inform policymakers.

Key works

• Palisade Research — studies of AI systems resisting shutdown and other dangerous behavior

Joy Buolamwini

Founder, Algorithmic Justice League

Computer scientist whose work on facial recognition bias helped launch the algorithmic accountability movement. Coach's note: Essential reading on how AI systems fail people who look like the rest of us.

Key works

• "Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification" (2018)
• "Unmasking AI" (2023)

Kate Crawford

Author of Atlas of AI; research professor at USC Annenberg

Researcher who studies AI as a material and political system - minerals, labor, energy and classification - and co-founded the AI Now Institute.

Key works

• Atlas of AI (2021)
• Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets (2019)
• Anatomy of an AI System (2018)

Luke Muehlhauser

Former MIRI executive director; AI governance at Open Philanthropy

Led the Machine Intelligence Research Institute from 2011 to 2015, then moved to Open Philanthropy, where he works on AI governance and policy grantmaking.

Key works

• Facing the Intelligence Explosion (2013, free online)

McKenzie Wark

Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, The New School

Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School.

Key works

• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Mél Hogan

Director, Environmental Media Lab

Director of the Environmental Media Lab at the University of Calgary.

Key works

• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Melanie Mitchell

Santa Fe Institute professor; author of a leading plain-language AI guide

Complexity researcher who writes about what current AI systems can and cannot do, arguing that benchmark performance is routinely mistaken for understanding.

Key works

• Abstraction and Analogy-Making in Artificial Intelligence (2021)
• The Debate Over Understanding in AI's Large Language Models (PNAS, 2023)
• Google Scholar profile

Meredith Whittaker

President of Signal; co-founder of the AI Now Institute

Spent over a decade at Google, helped organize the 2018 Google walkout, co-founded the AI Now Institute, and now leads the Signal Foundation. She argues AI is fundamentally a surveillance-business-model technology.

Key works

• The Steep Cost of Capture (ACM Interactions, 2021)
• AI Now Report 2018
• Signal blog posts on agentic AI and encryption

Nate Soares

MIRI researcher who co-wrote the paper formalising corrigibility

A researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and co-author of the 2015 paper that formalized corrigibility — the property of an AI system that lets you correct or switch it off without it resisting.

Key works

• If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (2025, with Eliezer Yudkowsky)

Nick Land

Philosopher of accelerationism and the Dark Enlightenment

English philosopher (b. 1962) best known for popularising accelerationism — the idea that capitalism and technology should be accelerated beyond human control. A former academic at the University of Warwick, he co-founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru) in the 1990s before leaving academia and moving to Shanghai. His later writing became foundational to the reactionary Dark Enlightenment movement, blending cybernetics, anti-egalitarian politics and esoteric numerology. Marc Andreessen cited him in the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. His views are widely described as extremist and anti-democratic; critics argue his influence on Silicon Valley is real but dangerous. He has no regular column; his commentary appears on social media.

Key works

• Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007 (2011)
• The Dark Enlightenment (2012–13, online essay series)

Oliver Habryka

Runs Lightcone Infrastructure, the team behind LessWrong

Leads Lightcone Infrastructure, which runs the LessWrong and AI Alignment Forum websites where much AI-risk debate takes place.

Key works

• LessWrong — the forum he relaunched in 2017 and runs through Lightcone Infrastructure

Olivia Guest

Associate professor of computational cognitive science

Associate professor at Radboud University working on computational modeling in cognitive science. Co-author of papers arguing that large language models are not models of human cognition and that using them as such misleads both fields; writes about the reproducibility and integrity problems that AI tools create for science.

Key works

• Papers and writing at olivia.science

Percy Liang

Director of Stanford CRFM

Associate professor of Computer Science at Stanford and director of the Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM), which studies large AI models and built the HELM evaluation benchmark.

Key works

• On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models (2021)
• Stanford CRFM

Sam Bankman-Fried

Founder of FTX; convicted of fraud in 2023

Founder of the FTX crypto exchange and Alameda Research, and a prominent donor to effective-altruism and AI-safety causes through the FTX Future Fund. Convicted in November 2023 of fraud and conspiracy after FTX's collapse and sentenced to 25 years in prison. His case is often cited in debates about effective altruism's influence on AI safety funding.

Key works

No research writing; the court record and reporting on FTX are the main primary sources.

Shane Legg

DeepMind co-founder who helped popularise the term AGI

A co-founder and chief scientist of Google DeepMind, and one of the people who helped put “artificial general intelligence” into common use in the early 2000s.

Key works

• Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence (2007, with Marcus Hutter)
• Machine Super Intelligence (PhD thesis, 2008)

Sophia Goodfriend

Anthropologist of AI and warfare

Harry F. Guggenheim Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge; PhD in cultural anthropology from Duke.

Key works

• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Stuart Russell

Author of Human Compatible; Berkeley professor

Co-author of the standard textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach and founder of Berkeley's Center for Human-Compatible AI. He argues the field's standard model of fixed objectives is the root of the control problem.

Key works

• Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control (2019)
• BBC Reith Lectures 2021: Living With Artificial Intelligence
• The Off-Switch Game (2017)

Timnit Gebru

Founder, Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR)

AI researcher and prominent voice on AI ethics, bias, and the risks of concentrated corporate control over AI development. Coach's note: Pairs well with the DAIR entry in the library — independent research, not corporate PR.

Key works

• "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" (2021)
• "Gender Shades" (2018)
• "Datasheets for Datasets" (2018/2021)

Vilas Dhar

President, Patrick J

McGovern Foundation. Leads a $1.5B foundation investing $500M+ to make AI work for everyone; writes on responsible AI and equitable technology. Coach's note: Follow for where philanthropic AI funding is going — useful if you're seeking grants.

Key works

• "Future of AI is a governance question, not a technology race"
• No personal blog or Substack — writings appear via the McGovern Foundation site and press interviews.

William MacAskill

Philosopher, co-founder of effective altruism

Oxford philosopher and a co-founder of the effective altruism movement.

Key works

Key works not listed yet.

Yoshua Bengio

Turing Award laureate; chair of the International AI Safety Report

Professor at the Universite de Montreal and founder of Mila, who shared the 2018 Turing Award for deep learning. He now chairs the International AI Safety Report and founded the nonprofit LawZero.

Key works

• International AI Safety Report (2025)
• Deep Learning (Nature, 2015, with LeCun and Hinton)
• Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate (2014)
• Managing extreme AI risks amid rapid progress (Science, 2024)