Brian Christian

Brian Christian studied at Brown University, University of Washington and High Technology High School. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is prose, poetry and philosophy. Works named in the authority record are Algorithms to Live By.

• Name — Brian Christian • Born — 1984 • Birthplace — Wilmington, Delaware, US • Language — English • Education — Brown University (AB) University of Washington (MFA) University of Oxford (DPhil) • Notable Works — The Most Human Human (2011) Algorithms to Live By (2016) The Alignment Problem (2020) • Website — brianchristian.org

Christian is a native of Little Silver, New Jersey. He attended high school at High Technology High School in Lincroft, New Jersey. Christian holds a degree from Brown University in computer science and philosophy, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington.

Beginning in 2012, Christian has been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. At UC Berkeley, he is affiliated with a number of research groups, including the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, and the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. In 2023, he was awarded a Clarendon Scholarship to pursue a doctorate in experimental psychology, with co-supervision in engineering science, at Lincoln College at the University of Oxford. Christian's research spans computational cognitive science and AI alignment, examining how formal systems in computer science intersect with human-centered questions in philosophy and psychology. Christian's work investigates topics including the computational structure of decision-making, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), and how reward models operationalize human preferences. Christian has an Erdős number of 3.

Christian competed as a "confederate" in the 2009 Loebner Prize competition, attempting to seem "more human" than the humans taking the test, and succeeded. The book he wrote about the experience, The Most Human Human, became a Wall Street Journal best-seller, a New York Times editors' choice, and a New Yorker favorite book of the year. He was interviewed by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show on March 8, 2011.

In 2016, Christian collaborated with cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths on the book Algorithms to Live By, which became the #1 bestselling nonfiction book on Audible and was named an Amazon best science book of the year and an MIT Technology Review best book of the year.

In 2020, Christian published his third book of nonfiction, The Alignment Problem, which looks at the rise of the ethics and safety movement in machine learning through historical research and the stories of approximately 100 researchers. The Alignment Problem was named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for best science and technology book of the year. The New York Times in 2024 named The Alignment Problem one of the "5 Best Books About Artificial Intelligence," writing: "If you're going to read one book on artificial intelligence, this is the one."

In 2025, Christian wrote the introduction for the 75th anniversary edition of Norbert Wiener's seminal work The Human Use of Human Beings, which explores the societal implications of cybernetics and automation.

Christian worked in web development beginning in the 1990s, and has contributed to open-source projects such as Bundler and Ruby on Rails. From 2013 to 2022, he served as Director of Technology at McSweeney's Publishing, where he oversaw the successful launch of a new version of McSweeney's Internet Tendency in 2016 and its first audio issue, in collaboration with Radiotopia, in 2021.