Now

1 Pivoting to AI safety as my critical-risk project

• I’m starting work at ACS Research on the Gradual Disempowerment team. I’ll be in the UK and Central Europe for all of April 2026 for this project. Hit me up.
• I’m co-founding an academic journal of AI alignment.
• I’m helping to spin up the Melbourne AI Safety hub, alongside various colleagues such as Liam Carroll, Dan Murfet, Alexander K Saeri, and many others 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 work list.

2 Civic tech and Utopian governance

I have a bee in my bonnet about the potential for civic tech to help us build better, more inclusive, more democratic institutions, and I want to get my hands dirty building some of it.

I’ve been discussing many potential community projects with a local meetup group.

I’m trying to choose between

• a local social platform for my neighbourhood — a sort of hyper-local Facebook, but with a focus on community-building and local events, and a more ethical approach to data and privacy than the big tech platforms.
• a local sovereign LLM — a large language model trained on Australian data, available for use by Australian researchers, businesses, and government agencies.
• a neo-friendly society, which would be a sort of mutual insurance

3 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.

4 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.