After more than a decade helping organizations solve talent, operational, and organizational problems, I eventually realized that no matter how much those problems varied, they were usually centered around the same underlying objective: the pursuit of profit.

There is nothing inherently wrong with making money, but I reached a point in my career where I wanted to apply the skills I'd spent years developing toward problems that mattered beyond the bottom line. I left the global firm where I'd built my career and started my own talent consultancy, expecting that greater independence might provide a greater sense of purpose. Instead, I discovered that changing the environment wasn't enough to change the underlying nature of my work, and that the path I was on would not lead to the fulfillment I was looking for.

That realization eventually led me toward AI safety.

My initial interest was driven by curiosity. As I explored the field more deeply, that curiosity transformed into conviction in the mission. When I learned that organizations working on AI safety must scale their people, systems, and institutional capacity to keep pace with accelerating AI advances, that conviction was compounded by another realization: I don't need to reinvent myself to contribute. Much of what I'd spent my career learning about - talent, organizations, incentives, leadership, and operational systems - could be directly useful. That's when my conviction turned into commitment. 

Since then, I've been actively working to transition into the AI safety community. That has meant learning about the organizations doing the work, reading research on alignment and AI risk, and trying to understand the field from multiple perspectives. The more I read, the more I want to contribute rather than simply consume.

That is also why I've joined the EA Forum and LessWrong. I don't want my resume to be the only thing I bring to this community. Over the past several months I've spent considerable time exploring alignment and risk models and thinking about them through the lens of my own experience. That process eventually led me to write my first substantial piece for the field, Preconditions of Gradual Disempowerment, which I've shared on both forums.

I'm particularly interested in questions around societal cognition, institutional capacity, incentives, governance, and the ways complex systems can gradually optimize away from their intended purpose. My professional experience has given me a fairly practical perspective on how organizations actually behave: how incentives shape decisions, how systems influence the people operating within them, how institutional problems persist, and how difficult it can be to recognize when something that is functioning efficiently is no longer functioning for the reasons it was created.

I don't claim to be someone who already has answers that others cannot produce. I'm much more interested in being someone who keeps asking questions—especially questions that may be uncomfortable, easy to overlook, or difficult to answer.

My hope is to contribute wherever my experience and perspective are useful, while learning from people who have spent far longer working on these problems than I have. I'm particularly interested in connecting with others who are willing to seriously examine difficult questions, whether or not we ultimately agree on the answers.