About

I'm building an AI safety program at the Center for Humane Technology. We're trying to find out whether the tech we're all racing to build is actually good for us, or not. Sometimes this is panic-inducing, sometimes I can't wait for the future — and most of the time I imagine we'll probably just stumble through as usual. Depends on the day (and, honestly, on the news cycle).

My first book — Psychedelics: The Essential Knowledge — will be published by MIT Press later this year. It explores the science, history, and culture of these strange substances. Combine that with the AI work and the fact that I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it turns out that I'm unable to resist becoming a cliché.

I moved to California in 2021, before becoming the founding Executive Director of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. Back in London, I ran public engagement at the Wellcome Trust and was once appointed CEO of the two-hundred-year-old British Science Association at age 27, which seemed like an astonishingly strange decision even at the time.

I genuinely wish there was an obvious logic to all of this. Science and society, technology and culture, something something? The honest answer is that I can't resist following my interests — curiosity about frontiers, social fairness, and organised skepticism — and it keeps leading me to interesting people and places.

There are times when I (and my family) wish I could have just had a 'normal career'. I grew up in a poor, immigrant neighbourhood in Manchester. It's not just that I was the first to go to college — my mum didn't finish high school, and we didn't know anybody who'd studied science, let alone actual researchers, or engineers, or artists. The idea that any of the above would happen would have been genuinely funny to everyone involved.

But now I live on a houseboat in the San Francisco Bay with my wife and our rescued blue heeler. I read too much science fiction, eat too much sugar, and spend too long trying to make the perfect daal.