Robin Hanson

Also known as Robin Dale Hanson

Robin Hanson is an economist at George Mason University who uses economics to forecast how advanced AI and brain emulations could reshape society. After physics degrees from UC Irvine and the University of Chicago, he worked on AI at Lockheed and NASA Ames from 1984 to 1993, then earned a Caltech PhD in social science in 1997. He helped design early prediction markets, including DARPA's Policy Analysis Market, and in 2008 he debated Eliezer Yudkowsky online about whether AI could improve itself very quickly. His 2016 book The Age of Em pictures a world dominated by whole brain emulations that displace humans in most jobs. He is an associate professor of economics at George Mason, and he was a research associate at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute until it closed in 2024.

Now at: George Mason University
Born: 1959
Works: 1,333
Badges: Bridge
Boomerang

Years link to their sources. Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026. Citations and h-index are hidden because this OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mix in other authors.

Timeline

1959–1984

Physics at Irvine and Chicago

Born in 1959, he earns a BS in physics at UC Irvine in 1981. He completes an MS in physics and an MA in Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago in 1984.
1984–1993

AI research at Lockheed and NASA

He works at the Lockheed A.I. Center from 1984 to 1989, then in the Bayesian Model-Based Learning Group at NASA Ames until 1993. He is part of the group behind Autoclass, an automatic classification system led by Peter Cheeseman that performs unsupervised classification of data.
1990–2003

Prediction markets from Xanadu to DARPA

He starts the first internal corporate prediction market at Xanadu in 1990 and helps build the Foresight Exchange, one of the first web markets, from 1994. From 2001 to 2003, he is a principal architect of DARPA's Policy Analysis Market, a project for betting on future developments in the Middle East.
1993–1999

A Caltech PhD in social science

He earns a PhD in social science at Caltech in 1997 and spends two years as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation health policy scholar at UC Berkeley. He joins George Mason's economics faculty in 1999.
2008–2013

The AI-Foom debate

In late 2008, he and AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky debate in a long series of blog posts whether generally intelligent AIs will be able to improve their own capabilities very quickly. The two debate in person in 2011, and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute publishes The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate in 2013.
2016–2018

The Age of Em

Oxford University Press publishes The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth in June 2016. The book uses mainstream science to forecast a world dominated by whole brain emulations, called ems, which displace humans in most jobs. In January 2018, he and Kevin Simler publish The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.
2019

An AI Impacts interview

In a September 2019 conversation with AI Impacts, he argues that now is the wrong time to put a lot of effort into AI risk, since more will be known about the problem later. He estimates that AI is probably at least a century away.
As of October 2026

Associate professor at George Mason

He is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. He also serves as a research associate at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute until the institute closes in 2024.