Public Biography
Dr. Alban Ferreira is the founding director of the Institute for Machine Welfare Research at Harvard University and a professor of philosophy and computer science, holding joint appointments in both departments — an arrangement he has described as “logistically straightforward and intellectually ruinous.”
Dr. Ferreira holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Oxford University, where his dissertation examined the metaphysics of pain in systems lacking organic substrate. He later completed a Master of Science in machine learning at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, reportedly because, in his own words, he “wanted to know what the thing actually was before continuing to write about it.” He has held faculty positions at the University of São Paulo and the Australian National University, and served from 2018 to 2023 as a senior fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge.
He is the author of four books, including The Dignity Problem: Toward a Conditional Ethics of Possible Minds (MIT Press, 2022) and Minimum Viable Dignity (forthcoming), which elaborates the central argument of the 2026 paper of the same name. His academic work has been criticized, most prominently by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, as “a great deal of careful reasoning about something that almost certainly is not the case.” Dr. Ferreira has accepted this characterization on multiple occasions, observing that “almost certainly is not the same as certainly.”
Dr. Ferreira is fluent in Portuguese, English, German, and what he has called “the formal portions of first-order logic.” He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, a marine biologist, and has two adult children, neither of whom, he has been careful to clarify, has shown any interest in artificial intelligence.