I spent twenty years as a product professional, building, supporting, advising, selling and managing products across five industries, most recently in the industrial aftermarket. Somewhere in the last two of those years I started asking what AI does to the people who use it, and the question would not leave. In July 2025, 80,000 Hours gave shape to a decision I knew was coming; in March 2026, with the runway I needed finally in place, I left my job for a self-funded sabbatical to work on this full-time. Stepping into research after two decades in industry is humbling, and I know how much I have to learn.

The work has a name now, Flourishing in the Age of Intelligence: actionable research at the interface of human, societal and machine systems, in four frontiers. 

• The Acceleration Problem: redefining product success dashboards to measure human well-being rather than compulsive engagement.
• Human Agency Preservation: buildable designs for AI that can disagree with you – protecting and growing a person's own judgement over time instead of trading it for instant agreement.
• The In-Between: rebuilding what work provides beyond the wage as AI automates roles, the daily structure, the community, the being needed.
• AI Welfare as Safety: how credible assurances and protections for AI systems can reduce defensiveness and conflict, as part of how everyone stays safe.

The method comes from the career, and it is why the programme is called actionable research. After twenty years of delivering under resistance, I know that ideas have to survive contact with real organisations or they change nothing. The need to react is growing faster than the usual path from finding to adoption allows, so what I hope to add is a practical, operational complement to established research practice: each piece of theory is designed to come with a buildable slice, a protocol, an evaluation instrument, or a pilot with its failure conditions defined upfront, so that it can be tried while it still matters.

The first piece, on how I came to this work and what I built for the crossing, is here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vJAwN5E3XbTDXL2Qv/the-crossing. I am here to learn how this community reasons, and I welcome feedback on where the work needs improvement. Above all I am looking for collaborators. At EAGx Oxford, more people than I expected said they would like to work on these frontiers with me, and there is more here than one pair of hands can carry. If you are a researcher, civic organiser or practitioner working on human agency, systems for human flourishing, or AI welfare and model behaviour, or if you are moving from product and tech into high-impact work and want to build something together, write to me.

In return, I can give feedback on positioning to anyone moving from an industry role into impact-focused work, and think alongside you on any of the four frontiers. And I built Cairn for my own move into this field: a free, open-source, local-first workspace, one file on your device, with a place for coursework as cards, a map of the field's organisations and opportunities, research frameworks, and a dated transition plan with regular check-ins, so you know where you are and what to do next. It was built for this field, but the structure works for any move into a new field from somewhere else. The app: https://mrponcedeleao.github.io/cairn/ · the code and starter packs: https://github.com/mrponcedeleao/cairn