By trade, I'm a lawyer specialising in cyber-incident response and contentious data privacy. I've spent my career working for and against the world's biggest tech platforms, and have worked for UK regulatory bodies.
I've seen first hand (and investigated) the terrifying power wielded by tech giants. These powers have been insufficiently constrained by regulation, and we have paid the consequence through the fracturing of our shared sense of truth, increasing political polarisation, and grave harms to public mental health.
These same giants are now unleashing AI upon the world; a technology more powerful and more unknowable than any before created. Perhaps the 'last' technology that will be meaningfully human-authored.
In 2017 I became interested in AI when advising the UKICO on their policy paper 'Big Data and Machine Learning'. I read Nick Bostrom's "Superintelligence" and had my eyes opened to the risks. Dangerous technologies put easily within reach of malicious actors; vulnerable critical infrastructure; bio-terrorism; and loss of control leading to extinction of the human species.
In 2023, ChatGPT emerged and made crystal clear that AI capabilities had advanced far quicker than anyone was expecting. This put the risk firmly in view. No longer a nebulous hypothetical, but something real and imminent.
In 2025 my first daughter was born. In one of my more introspective moments, I looked into the future and imagined a conversation with her. She asked "why didn't you do something?" I couldn't imagine facing that conversation with nothing to say in response.
I immediately started working with PauseAI and other groups. I launched my own website attempting to cut through the noise and clean-up the logical arguments around catastrophic risk.
I now view things with the kind of urgency that perhaps uniquely comes from having a child.
We face a difficult challenge ahead.
To do what is required, we must all view this through challenge the lens of the ancient proverb: "we must be willing to plant trees under whose shade we will never sit." We must act carefully and decisively to preserve our future: one that we may not be around to see, but that will be inherited by our children."