In mid-December, I left Spring, and about a month later I joined Ought as their head of engineering. It was a momentous change to a leave a job, a company, and my team after so long, but there are so many aspects to Ought that I’m incredibly excited for that in the end it was a move I had to make. Here are some of the reasons it was not only easy but essential for me to join Ought. If any of these…
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On December 15th, 2021, I will leave Spring – the company I have been with for almost seven years. Along the way, I’ve seen quite a few people quit, fired a few people, and made some pretty big mis-steps when planning my own departure. The goal of this post is to summarise some patterns and anti-patterns, so that in the future you or I can leave our roles in the most professional and positive way…
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In a recent post on LessWrong, Andrew Critch imagines scenarios in which networks of seemingly well-behaved AI systems nonetheless results in humanity’s demise. In it, he mentions: … [both stories] follow a progression from less automation to more, and correspondingly from more human control to less … The comment is only made in passing, but it seems (a) interesting and (b) important: is this…
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About a decade ago, a friend and I were talking over dinner about our shared passion for electronic music. Our burning question was: how can we convince the world to love techno as much as we do? A common—and not always unfair—criticism is that electronic music can be repetitive, lacking an overall arc, or overly simplistic: especially when compared to something like a classical concerto. However…
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In The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris describes a framework which allows for strictly rational conversations about morality. It is based on the idea that ethical questions are eventually decomposable into objective questions about suffering and flourishing: … in the moral sphere, it is safe to begin with the premise that it is good to avoid behaving in such a way as to produce the worst possible…
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