My name is Zach. I’m a product strategist, researcher, and ethicist working to advance AI for a wiser world.
AI is transforming every industry. We are giving it increasingly greater capacity for insight, prediction, and action, but without thoughtful consideration and experimentation, AI will leave us with less agency and purpose.
I work to address this challenge, supporting executives and R&D teams to build AI that empowers humans, products and services that help us learn more deeply, expand our fields of choice, and enhance the richness of our lives.
I am currently accepting consulting engagements and exploring full time roles.
Below you’ll find examples of the kind of work I do.
I focus on the intersection of human-centered design, R&D, policy, and education for pivotal applications of computational and hybrid intelligence.
Product Research
AI for Child Welfare and Whole City Resilience
Research study in partnership with a state wide children’s social services non-profit to use their machine learning model to predict service interventions that not only improve children’s wellbeing but increase the resilience of a city overall. The results will be used to inform city wide development planning and policy. Ongoing.
An independent grant funded project to investigate the potential benefits of taking a biomimetic approach to digital technology design broadly. Resulted in the preliminary translation of resilience metrics from ecological network science to potential software for actively monitoring and suggesting interventions to improve the resilience of complex supply chains. Preliminary Conceptual Research Complete.
Neurotech Ethics
Neurotechnologies including brain-machine interfaces and advanced neuroimaging, and synthetic psychedelics are initiating a new era of finer control over cognition and emotional functioning. In collaboration with partners at Harvard MGH, we are authoring guidance on R&D for neurotechnologies that prioritizes verifiable user privacy and sovereignty, active rather than passive biofeedback, and wide phenomenological exploration. In Progress.
Strategy and Business Development
Sensemaking Networks
Sensemaking Networks is led by Ronen Tamari in his position as Entrepreneur-in-Residence in Astera Institute’s Open Science program. Ronen’s project is about re-thinking science social media as an integral part of science by combining social networks, AI, and semantic nanopublishing to improve how we collectively make sense of science. I am advising on mission and branding, entity structure, fundraising strategy, business model design, features roadmapping, and potential exit plans. In Progress.
Policy
The Future of AI at The Future US
I lead the Future of AI program at the Future US, a D.C.-based policy accelerator that brings industry leaders and senior policy makers together for co-education and policy co-design sprints to consider effective policy creation 3-5 years ahead of the tech curve and before issues become partisan. Past D.C. leadership attendees have included the Chief of Staff at DARPA, a Deputy National Security Advisor, Senior Advisors in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the former Secretary of Homeland Security. Ongoing.
Public Education
I was the Executive Producer for ( N )( F )( T ), a docuseries and multimedia public education project exploring non-fungible tokens and their impact on digital art practice, culture, and economics commissioned by Protocol Labs. The films were viewed in screenings online and in person around the country for up to 200 people at a time. Complete.
Algorithmic Right to Repair
Invited panelist at DWeb Camp 2024. I presented a hierarchy of points of repair to foster trust in algorithms from the algorithms themselves, to the legal and financing structures of the entities that build and deploy them, to the cultural and civic capacity for sensemaking and governance to decide how to regulate and apply them, with specific recommendations for legal and finance structures as applied to the emerging field of Public AI.