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.James was born in Cape Canaveral, Florida, raised in Texas and received his PhD from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. He is a member of the Digital Ethics Lab at Oxford and founder of the Oxford Internet Institute’s PhilTech seminar series. He directed the Oxford Data Experience Lab project on virtual reality and has helped teach the master’s-level Internet Technology and Regulation course. He is also a visiting researcher at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.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 holds a Master’s in Design Engineering from the University of Washington and as an undergraduate studied literature at Seattle Pacific University. 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.