Huw Price


Huw Price is an Australian philosopher, currently the Bertrand Russell Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy, Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
He was previously Challis Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney, and before that Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh. He is also one of three founders and the Academic Director of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, and the Academic Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.

Work

Price is known for his work in philosophy of physics and for his brand of "neo-pragmatism" and "anti-representationalism," according to which "all utterances must be looked at through the lens of their function in our interactions, not the metaphysics of their semantic relations." This view has acknowledged affinities with the work of Robert Brandom and, earlier, Wilfrid Sellars.
He was elected a Fellow of Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1994, and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2012.

Machine intelligence

Around 2012, Price co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, stating that "It seems a reasonable prediction that some time in this or the next century intelligence will escape from the constraints of biology." Price voices concern that as computers become smarter than humans, humans could someday be destroyed by "machines that are not malicious, but machines whose interests don't include us," and seeks to push this concern forward in the "respectable scientific community". Around 2015, he assumed the directorship of the new Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, stating "Machine intelligence will be one of the defining themes of our century, and the challenges of ensuring that we make good use of its opportunities are ones we all face together. At present, however, we have barely begun to consider its ramifications, good or bad."

Publications