About
I’m an AI ethicist and philosopher of cognitive science, working on human-AI relationships, machine minds, and human flourishing in the age of AI. Since 2026 I’ve done this from inside Google DeepMind, where my job title is, improbably, Philosopher. I keep one foot in Cambridge, at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where I co-founded the UK’s first master’s programmes in AI ethics and have shepherded rather a lot of graduate students.
The central questions that motivate my research are at once perennial yet suddenly very pressing. How can we distinguish conscious from non-conscious entities? Where does anthropomorphism end, and where do non-human minds begin? What capacities and relations make an animal or a machine morally significant? Can machines think, understand, or be creative? I’ve written twenty-odd papers circling these, and am working on a monograph on the ethics of Social AI for Cambridge University Press due late in 2026, along with a popular book on machine consciousness coming in 2027. I’ve popularised a range of terms across philosophy and cognitive science, from Anthropomimesis to Social AI and The Specificity Problem.
My path to my current career was circuitous. After a frankly pretty idyllic childhood in rural Staffordshire, I studied Classics at Oxford, acquiring a profound fascination with Ancient history, languages, and literature. Along the way, I was nerdsniped by the problem of consciousness, and my life trajectory has never recovered. Determined to figure out what the hell was going on, I studied for the BPhil in Philosophy at Oxford working with Tim Bayne on consciousness science, then a PhD on consciousness and animal minds at CUNY under Peter Godfrey-Smith. For the last 12 years now, my key preoccupation has been understanding non-human minds, both animals and machines, and I am deeply convinced that there is massive value in integrating these projects.
I blog about machine consciousness, human-AI relations, and whatever takes my fancy over at Polytropolis, named for the epithet Homer gives Odysseus, polytropos, the man of many turns. It is meant both confessionally and programmatically: I am a hopeless intellectual butterfly and wander between topics like a distracted supermarket shopper ambling between aisles. I co-host two podcasts, Conspicuous Cognition with Dan Williams and Exploring Machine Consciousness.
I’m a vegetarian of long standing with inconvenient convictions about animal welfare, a middling painter of Warhammer miniatures, and an enthusiastic Gamesmaster for several D&D campaigns. I grew up near Stoke-on-Trent and live in Cambridge with my wife Wanda and our children, Stephen and Selene.
Contact: hfshevlin [at] gmail.com