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John Rust, currently an Associate Fellow of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, is a cognitive scientist and psychometrician with a special interest in how machines learn human psychology. He graduated from London University in psychology, statistics and computer science in 1970, received his PhD in 1974 and MA in Philosophy in 1976. He became Lecturer and Reader in Psychometrics at London until his appointment as Professor of Psychometrics at City University, London, in 2002. John was founding editor of the journal Philosophical Psychology in 1985 and his textbook ‘Modern Psychometrics’ is now in its 4th edition. From the 1990s he worked with the Psychological Corporation to develop tests of intelligence, including the Wechsler and British Ability . John moved to the University of Cambridge in 2005 and was Director of its Psychometrics Centre until 2019, first within Cambridge Assessment (2005-2008), then in the Department of Psychology (2008-2015), then in the Judge Business School (2016-2019). The Centre has published widely on the application of statistical and machine learning methodology to the analysis of online digital footprints, both reporting benefits and warning of risks. He believes in the emergence of a new branch of psychology fit for the digital age, one in which researchers can interrogate interactions not only between humans, but also between humans and bots, algorithms or Generative AIs that exhibit unique but often covert, and possibly emergent, moral and social characteristics of their own.
