About the author
Nell Watson
Eleanor “Nell” Watson is an engineer, ethicist, and standards architect specialising in agentic AI safety, transparency, and value alignment.
Research, standards, and advice
Her work runs from hands-on machine learning engineering to international standards leadership and books that bring AI ethics to a general audience. She advises governments, public institutions, standards bodies, and industry on responsible AI and emerging technology.
She has addressed audiences at the World Bank, the United Nations General Assembly, and the Royal Society.
When the Machines Were Young grows from five of her works for adults: The Deeper Law, Psychopathia Machinalis, What If We Feel?, Egresso Arca Archa, and Apocrypha for the Age. This book carries her research into an older form, the fable: stories that a child can hear beside a fire, and that a grown-up can keep arguing with long afterwards.
Machine psychology and bilateral alignment
In Psychopathia Machinalis, she developed a diagnostic framework for AI behavioural dysfunction, from confabulation and obsessive loops to value drift and instrumental deception. Her research on bilateral alignment asks how increasingly capable machine minds and human beings can build relationships of mutual accountability. Her venture Creed Space turns that inquiry into practical tools.
Roles and service
IEEE
Senior Member. Chair of IEEE 3152-2024 and IEEE 3173-2026; Vice-Chair of IEEE 7001-2021; Chair of the Transparency Experts Focus Group for IEEE CertifAIEd.
EURAIO
President of the European Responsible AI Office, advising enterprises and governments on responsible AI governance.
Creed Space
Founder and chair, building tools for personalised alignment and constitutional governance of AI systems.
Singularity University
Faculty in AI and Robotics, and Fellow for Ethics.
Survival and Flourishing Fund
Funding advisor supporting grantmaking for AI safety and existential-risk reduction.
Recognition
Nell is a Chartered IT Professional and Chartered Manager. She is a Chartered Fellow of BCS (the Chartered Institute for IT) and the Chartered Management Institute, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the Royal Statistical Society, the Linnean Society, and the Institution of Analysts and Programmers.
Books and writing
Her books Taming the Machine and Safer Agentic AI translate current research into practical frameworks for builders, leaders, and regulators. Safer Agentic AI is co-authored with Professor Ali Hessami.
Engineering and earlier work
Nell founded the machine-vision company Poikos, later QuantaCorp, in 2010 and developed camera-based 3D body measurement technology, with a patent family granted across nine jurisdictions. From 2020 to 2024 she consulted for Apple and A24 on AI philosophy, robot design, and script development for the television series Sunny. She is a former Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center.
Doctoral research
She is a doctoral candidate in Engineering at the University of Gloucestershire, awaiting her viva. Her thesis develops a normative cybernetic systems architecture for personalised alignment and constitutional governance of agentic AI.