Dr. Patrick Lin

Patrick Lin, PhD, is the director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at Cal Poly, where he is a full philosophy professor.

He is currently affiliated with Stanford Law School, the 100 Year Study on AI, Czech Academy of Sciences, and the World Economic Forum. Previous affiliations include: US Naval Academy, Stanford’s School of Engineering, Univ. of Notre Dame, Dartmouth, UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), and the Fulbright specialist program (Univ. of Iceland, on Arctic conflicts).

Prof. Lin is well published in technology ethics, particularly in: AI, robotics, military technologies, cybersecurity, bioengineering, nanotechnology, frontier development (Arctic, outer space), and more. This includes funded reports on the ethics of autonomous military robotics, military human enhancements, and hacking back, as well as other publications relevant to national and domestic security.

He is regularly invited to provide ethics briefings to industry, media, and government, especially defense and intelligence organizations in the US and internationally. He teaches courses in ethics, philosophy of technology, and philosophy of law, and he earned his BA from UC Berkeley and PhD from UC Santa Barbara.