ABOUT ME
Welcome to my website. I’m a Mexican immigrant in the US living in Terre Haute, IN, with a B.A. in philosophy and English from Williams College and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Arizona. After working in the academy for some time, I transitioned to the AI industry so I could use my education and skills to have more immediate and profound impacts on human well-being, help build AI that is safe and beneficial, and leverage this transformative technology to unlock human potential.
My own experience working with large AI models has transformed my thinking and research, and I am committed to using these tools to help protect and empower people rather than expose them to new forms of harm. My research develops a new, scientifically informed paradigm for ethics aimed at guiding AI systems and other large-scale socio-technical infrastructures. I work at the intersection of philosophy, physics, evolutionary ecology, and social justice to understand how moral life actually unfolds in complex, unequal worlds—and how we can redesign our systems to better support human dignity, autonomy, and flourishing. In practice, this means treating AI systems not as isolated products, but as components of wider “ethosystems”: interconnected psycho-social, economic, political, technological, and ecological environments that shape—and are shaped by—our collective behavior.
I believe philosophy’s transformative and liberating potential can only be unlocked when we connect it to the lived experiences and conditions of people navigating unprecedented crises and unprecedented opportunities. Making this connection requires putting philosophy in conversation with the full spectrum of disciplines, including the sciences, arts, humanities, design, and cuisine, with special emphasis on bodies of knowledge that center the perspectives of marginalized and oppressed communities. When we take this kind of approach, we see that today’s social problems—and the risks and opportunities of AI—can only be effectively addressed using multidisciplinary frameworks that guide nuanced, intersectoral interventions across our social, economic, legal, political, cultural, and technological systems.
My work is therefore thoroughly multidisciplinary and praxis-oriented. I am always looking for collaborators inside and outside the academy—especially in AI, policy, and design—who are interested in using rigorous theoretical tools to craft concrete solutions to real-world problems. At its best, theorizing can guide and improve practice, and practice can in turn refine and deepen our theorizing, creating upward spirals of mutually reinforcing insight and action. That is the form I aim for my philosophy, and my AI work, to take.
I also have a deep passion for information visualization and what it can do to unlock insight and understanding. I'm currently exploring this passion through my multidisciplinary Visualizing Kant Project, which combines philosophy, design, and information visualization to make Kant's philosophical system accessible and exciting to a wider audience—and to experiment with new visual languages that can help us see ethical and AI-related phenomena in clearer, more actionable ways.