Now
2009-03-05 — 2026-03-29
Wherein a pivot to AI safety is recorded, work being commenced with ACS Research’s gradual disempowerment team, whilst Melbourne cohousing and a shopfront gig space are paused by April travel in Europe.
Hi, I’m Dan MacKinlay. This is my now page, in a constellation of now pages.
1 Pivoting to AI safety as my critical-risk project
- I’m starting work at ACS Research on the Gradual disempowerment team.
- I’m co-founding an academic journal of AI alignment.
- I’m helping to spin up the Melbourne AI Safety hub in a small way, alongside luminaries such as Liam Carroll, Dan Murfet, Alexander K Saeri, and many other colleagues whose homepages I haven’t linked to yet.
My current active research interests are causal agency and AI disempowerment, although I remain voraciously interested in everything. I maintain a separate, aspirational reading and writing worklist.
2 Living a human life
I’m trying to level up my engagement with my new hometown of Melbourne as part of my cohousing project (Ouroboros is the housing group; we’d love skill-shares) and my new, explicit extrovert’s commitment to group projects in general. I’m trying to build out a gig space in our shopfront, but it’s hard when the collective is small and time is short.
Except! All that is on hold right now. Due to the conflict involving Iran, travel is disrupted and I’m likely to be in Europe for all of April. Let’s catch up for chats. And if anyone has a sofa I can crash on in NL, CH, CZ, or DE, please let me know.
3 Arts
Musically, I’m still DJing, but not professionally any longer. I’ll upload some new mixes if I can work out which old mixes to delete. I don’t have much time for music production at the moment, but our Lotekno EPs are gradually coming out.
