James Barrat is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and internationally recognized author whose work has shaped the world’s understanding of artificial intelligence and its profound societal risks. He is best known for his groundbreaking bestseller Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era - an Amazon #1 Bestseller and Huffington Post’s Definitive Tech Book of 2013 - which helped define the modern discourse on AI safety long before generative AI captured global attention. Time Magazine named him one of “Five Very Smart People Who Think Artificial Intelligence Could Bring the Apocalypse,” recognizing his influence in the global debate over AI risk, ethics, and governance.

Barrat’s upcoming book, The Intelligence Explosion: When AI Beats Humans at Everything (St. Martin’s Press, 2025), expands on this legacy by examining the world beyond generative AI - charting how rapidly accelerating machine intelligence is surpassing human judgment, undermining regulatory assumptions, and creating ethical and existential challenges we are unprepared to face. His work exposes the widening gap between the speed of AI development and society’s ability to understand or control it, highlighting the emerging dangers Big Tech companies rarely acknowledge.

With more than two decades of experience as both a filmmaker and researcher, Barrat has a unique ability to illuminate complex systems with technical clarity and emotional depth. His acclaimed documentaries - including PBS’s Facing Suicide and Spillover: Zika, Ebola, and Beyond - have reached millions, demonstrating his commitment to communicating science, public health, and human vulnerability with precision and compassion. Today, his central focus is on the societal, ethical, and existential risks of artificial intelligence: from emergent behaviors in large-scale generative models to the moral responsibilities of those building systems that may soon exceed human-level intelligence.

Barrat’s mission is to clarify what others obscure. He challenges the hype, exposes the industry’s blind spots, and translates opaque technical issues - alignment failures, black-box behavior, cognitive bias in machine systems - into narratives the public can grasp and act upon. He argues that an informed public may be the only meaningful safety mechanism left in a world where advanced AI is developed largely without transparency, oversight, or accountability.

Through his books, films, and keynote talks, James Barrat bridges the worlds of technology, ethics, and public understanding. He helps audiences confront urgent questions about human survival, agency, and meaning in an era where intelligence is no longer a uniquely human trait. By illuminating both the promise and peril of AI, Barrat equips society with the insight, clarity, and moral urgency needed to navigate one of the most consequential technological transformations in human history.