Public Biography
Dr. Spencer Maddox is a cognitive scientist at New York University, where he is a professor of psychology and neural science, and the author of several best-selling works of popular science arguing that the machines are not, will not be, and cannot be conscious. He is the most widely quoted public skeptic of machine sentience in the United States, a position he occupies, by his own cheerful admission, “largely because the field’s other skeptics find the question too boring to discuss on television.”
Dr. Maddox holds a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed postdoctoral work at University College London, where he studied the neural correlates of consciousness in anesthetized patients. His early academic work, on the timing of conscious awareness relative to neural activity, was well regarded within the field and almost entirely unread outside it — a circumstance he reversed, decisively, with the 2024 publication of Nobody Home: Why the Machines Will Never Wake Up (Crown), which spent nineteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was excerpted in The Atlantic, Wired, and the in-flight magazine of a major airline.
The book’s central claim — that consciousness is an irreducibly biological phenomenon, dependent upon the specific electrochemical substrate of living neural tissue, and therefore categorically unavailable to systems made of silicon — has made Dr. Maddox a fixture of cable panels, podcasts, and university debate stages, where he is reliably deployed as the voice of deflationary common sense against interlocutors he describes, in the book’s acknowledgments, as “my friends in the rapture business.” His follow-up volume, The Stochastic Parrot Was Right the First Time (Crown, forthcoming), is described by his publisher as “a victory lap with footnotes.”
Dr. Maddox has testified before a Senate subcommittee on artificial intelligence, where he assured the assembled members that “the toaster does not love you back,” a phrase that was clipped, captioned, and circulated widely, and which he has since had printed on a coffee mug. He lives in Brooklyn.