The Moral Algorithm

**Robert Smith** is a technologist, writer, and advocate for responsible artificial intelligence. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University, where his dissertation explored the intersection of narrative theory and machine ethics. For a decade, he worked as a senior AI researcher at the MIT Media Lab, designing systems that incorporated principles from science fiction and moral philosophy into real‑world applications—from healthcare decision support to content moderation. His research has been published in *Nature Machine Intelligence* and *Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence*.

Smith is the founder of the **Sartori Lab**, a non‑profit that develops open‑source tools for auditing algorithmic bias and hosts an annual workshop where engineers collaborate with science fiction authors to stress‑test AI designs. He has served on the advisory board of the **Partnership on AI** and consulted for the European Commission on the AI Act. His writing on technology and society has appeared in *Wired*, *The Atlantic*, and *MIT Technology Review*.

A lifelong fan of speculative fiction, Smith frequently lectures on how stories from Asimov to Chiang can inform today’s AI governance debates. He is also the author of *Machine Dreams: A Short History of Thinking Things* and the novel *The Last Turing Test*. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he can be found arguing about the ethics of autonomous vehicles over coffee.