Ethics

The Alignment Problem

Blind Spots, Consistency, and What Remains

On moral exemplars, blind spots, and applying consistent standards—to others and to oneself.

Phenomenological Ethics: Starting From What Hurts

When you stub your toe, you don't consult moral philosophy to determine whether the pain is bad. The badness is immediate. Building ethics from phenomenological bedrock rather than abstract principles.

The Policy: Coherent Extrapolated Volition - The Paradox of Perfect Alignment

Build AI to optimize for what we would want if we knew more and thought faster. Beautiful in theory. Horrifying in practice. What if we don't actually want what our better selves would want?

The Policy: S-Risk Scenarios - Worse Than Extinction

Most AI risk discussions focus on extinction. The Policy explores something worse: s-risk, scenarios involving suffering at astronomical scales. We survive, but wish we hadn't.

Post-ASI Archaeology: When Humanity Becomes a Dataset of Origins

We will not be remembered — we will be indexed. If superintelligence endures beyond us, remembrance shifts from memory to query. Building legacy systems not for nostalgia, but to remain legible in a future where legibility determines what persists.

API Design as Value Imprinting

I’ve been thinking about how API design encodes values—not just technical decisions, but philosophical ones.

Every interface you create is a constraint on future behavior. Every abstraction emphasizes certain patterns and discourages others. …

On Moral Responsibility: Why Free Will Might Be the Wrong Question

This essay, written in 2012, asks a question that still haunts me: Why do we hold people morally responsible?

The Setup

People throughout history have believed they belong to a special categorical class: persons. What makes persons special? Their …

On moral responsibility: a metaphysical examination

On Moral Responsibility: A Metaphysical Examination

A philosophical exploration of free will, determinism, and moral agency. What does it mean to be a moral agent? Can we truly be held responsible for our actions in a deterministic universe?