Murray Patrick Shanahan (also known as Murray Shanahan) is a professor of Cognitive Robotics in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London and a senior scientist at DeepMind.^[2] He completed a BSc at Imperial College London and a PhD at the University of Cambridge with a doctoral thesis titled "Exploiting dependencies in search and inference mechanisms" supervised by William F. Clocksin. His research focuses on artificial intelligence, robotics, cognitive science, neurodynamics, and consciousness.^[4,5,3] His personal homepage is located at http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~mpsha.

At Imperial College, in the Department of Computing, Shanahan was a postdoc from 1987 to 1991 and an advanced research fellow until 1995. At Queen Mary & Westfield College, he was a senior research fellow from 1995 to 1998. Shanahan joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at Imperial, and then in 2005 the Department of Computing, where he was promoted from Reader to Professor in 2006.^[3,6] In 2017, citing "the potential (brain drain) on academia of the current tech hiring frenzy" as an issue of concern, Shanahan negotiated a joint position at Imperial College London and DeepMind.^[3,14,12]

In 2016 Shanahan and his colleagues published a proof-of-concept for "Deep Symbolic Reinforcement Learning", a specific hybrid AI architecture that combines symbolic AI with neural networks, and that exhibits a form of transfer learning.^[11,10] Shanahan was a scientific advisor for Alex Garland's 2014 film Ex Machina.^[11] Garland credited Shanahan with correcting an error in Garland's initial scripts regarding the Turing test.^[8,7] Shanahan is on the external advisory board for the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.^[9] The Atlantic and Wired UK have characterized Shanahan as an influential researcher.^[13]

In 2010, Shanahan published Embodiment and the inner life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds, a book that helped inspire the 2014 film Ex Machina. The book argues that cognition revolves around a process of "inner rehearsal" by an embodied entity working to predict the consequences of its physical actions.^[15]

In 2015, Shanahan published The Technological Singularity, which runs through various scenarios following the invention of an artificial intelligence that makes better versions of itself and rapidly outcompetes humans.^[16] The book aims to be an evenhanded primer on the issues surrounding superhuman intelligence.^[17] Shanahan takes the view that we do not know how superintelligences will behave: whether they will be friendly or hostile, predictable or inscrutable.^[18]

In 2014, Shanahan said regarding existential risks from AI that "The AI community does not think it's a substantial worry, whereas the public does think it's much more of an issue. The right place to be is probably in-between those two extremes." He added that "it's probably a good idea for AI researchers to start thinking (now) about the (existential risk) issues that Stephen Hawking and others have raised." Shanahan stated in 2018 that there was no need to panic yet about an AI takeover because multiple conceptual breakthroughs would be needed for artificial general intelligence (AGI), and "it is impossible to know when (AGI) might be achievable". He stated that AGI would come hand-in-hand with true understanding, enabling applications such as safer automated vehicles and medical diagnosis.^[20,21,19] In 2020, Shanahan characterized AI as lacking the common sense of a human child.

Shanahan's recorded appearances include a two-minute lecture on AI for the BBC in 2014, as well as a 2018 presentation on AI at the University of Dublin. In 2025, he delivered a lecture titled "Nāgārjuna, Wittgenstein, and Artificial Intelligence" at the 39th Mind & Life Dialogue, held in Dharamsala.