Donald Michie was born on 11 November 1923, and was educated at Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford. He obtained the MA, DPhil, and DSc degrees from Oxford University for studies in biological sciences. For contributions to artificial intelligence he was elected a founding Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence. He has received honorary degrees from the UK's National Council of Academic Awards, from Salford University, Aberdeen University, the University of York and the University of Stirling.

His awards included the 1995 Achievement Medal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (UK) for contributions to computing and control, and the 1996 Feigenbaum Medal of the World Congress on Expert Systems for his development of machine learning into an industrial-strength tool. In 2001 he received the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence. His interest in programming human intelligence into machines originated during his membership of the British code-breaking group at Bletchley Park during World War 2.

Professor Michie was founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Machine Intelligence series, of which nineteen volumes were published. He was a Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Sciences and of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Professor Emeritus of Machine Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh.

He was also founder and treasurer of the Human-Computer Learning Foundation, a charity registered in the UK.