Jacob Taylor

Jacob Taylor is a fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development at Brookings and co-chair of 17 Rooms—an initiative for new forms of collaborative problem-solving for sustainable development created in partnership with The Rockefeller Foundation.

Taylor’s research focuses on mechanisms of collective intelligence for the world’s toughest challenges. He draws on his training as an anthropologist of human performance in elite teams to inform the design of new approaches to human-AI collaboration (such as “vibe teaming” and “context-maxxing“), AI for policymaking, and digital and AI ecosystems that work for people and planet—and not the other way around. He brings practical experience from applied research roles, including as a consulting scientist to a DARPA program for developing an “AI teammate” and as a research fellow at the Asian Bureau of Economic Research at the Australian National University.

He has a regional research focus on China, having spent several years studying, working, and conducting ethnographic research in Beijing with the local Chinese sports community. He has a background in professional team sports, representing his home country of Australia in Rugby 7s, 2009 to 2013. He received a Bachelor of Arts (Honors and University Medal) from the University of Sydney and a Doctor of Philosophy in anthropology from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes scholar.