James Williams

James Williams is a writer, speaker and philosopher. He was the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, worth $100,000, in 2017.

He received his PhD from Oxford, where he studied under Professor Luciano Floridi. He has been a research associate at the OII’s Digital Ethics Lab, a visiting researcher at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, a tutor in the Oxford Computer Science department, and a visiting fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, & Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Prior to this he worked for over ten years at Google, where he received the Founders’ Award – the company’s highest honour – for his work. He is a co-founder of the Time Well Spent campaign, a project that aims to steer technology design towards having greater respect for users’ attention, goals and values. James is a frequent speaker, consultant for companies and governments, and commentator on technology issues in the media.