Ethics for our most consequential choices.
Ethics: The study and practice of making more effective choices.
McNamara serves on a discrete ethics team studying the most consequential issues defining our times and shaping our futures. This team develops high-relevance tooling for higher-quality sense-making and more effective risk mitigation to help people generate increasingly relevant and valuable contributions in today's world.
Efforts concentrate action toward growing more generative social capabilities, developing better technological solutions and protecting economic viabilities.
We believe clarifying how we think about ethics and deepening the pragmatic utility of training in and practicing new non-relative ethical principles can better potentiate and direct high-value ecosystems to make substantive changes to shape better futures.
Navigating the risks of Artificial Intelligence
Rob's current efforts are focused on educating families, organizations and governments alongside AI scientists and engineers of the risks AI systems can pose. Currently McNamara is focusing attention on two key areas:
Social & Psychological Risks
Some AI systems can pose significant disruptions to social bonding, attachment processes and identity formation. Self-esteem and personhood regulation are frequently exposed and rapid capability erosions have already been demonstrated in early research findings. Many AI systems open up vulnerabilities to sense-making and choice-making processes.
Governments, organizations, families and individuals are wise to gain deeper understanding of the attack surfaces AI systems expose people to. Civilians, soldiers and government officials alike are encouraged to better orient themselves to the novel forms of irregular warfare in play today.
Our social capabilities reside at the heart of our experience of being human. And many will attest collaborating with others and sharing life together are foundational to the most meaningful parts of life. Our engineered technologies that are designed to imitate and interrupt how we relate all too commonly undermine our highest value social skills. If we are to bolster our social capabilities, not erode them, we need new designs to guide technologies.
Governments, organizations, families and individuals are wise to gain deeper understanding of the attack surfaces AI systems expose people to. Civilians, soldiers and government officials alike are encouraged to better orient themselves to the novel forms of irregular warfare in play today.
Our social capabilities reside at the heart of our experience of being human. And many will attest collaborating with others and sharing life together are foundational to the most meaningful parts of life. Our engineered technologies that are designed to imitate and interrupt how we relate all too commonly undermine our highest value social skills. If we are to bolster our social capabilities, not erode them, we need new designs to guide technologies.
Control Degridation & Environmental Risks
Core theorems in mathematics establish fixed limits to controllability and thus alignment. Government and organizational leaders need to operate with better sense-making and planning to effectively insulate their people and infrastructure investments. As AI systems continue to grow in complexity and capability increasing losses of control can be expected.
Computer science, information theory, physics and game theory intersect to create a near-perfected risk to our long-term viability as a species. The environments required to create and operate AI infrastructures is incompatible with what enables carbon-based life to flourish. Understanding the thermodynamics of what we create is now a minimum requirement if we are create inflections from our current collective trajectory.
Computer science, information theory, physics and game theory intersect to create a near-perfected risk to our long-term viability as a species. The environments required to create and operate AI infrastructures is incompatible with what enables carbon-based life to flourish. Understanding the thermodynamics of what we create is now a minimum requirement if we are create inflections from our current collective trajectory.
Rise above the known.
Explore the possible.
Embody the good.
Thought Leading Books
Over the past 13 years McNamara has authored 4 books helping readers to better mature themselves, evolve the quality of their relationships and cultivate foundational capabilities for more effectively navigating our world.7 Strategies for Cultivating Greater Maturities
- Essential Instructions for what to do.
- Valuable discernments for what to avoid.
- Practices to catalyze and support your development.
- One strategy delivered every other day for 14 days.
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- Valuable discernments for what to avoid.
- Practices to catalyze and support your development.
- One strategy delivered every other day for 14 days.
Subscribe Below