This is the major project / small thesis which consituted the capstone of my masters degree in Theology. It describes how recent efforts to bring Generative AI (GenAI) use into popular demand have spawned a number of urgent questions about the nature of AI and the consequences of embedding such systems more deeply into human life. By relying on insights from both philosophy and theology, I argue that, in addition to the various "external" or existential risks and unintended consequences of GenAI, its use poses a special risk to the "internal" character of human life. Because it treats human creative artifacts as raw grist for the content mill, and surrenders the creative process itself to a technological device, thoughtless GenAI use risks the atrophy of the creative faculties whose expression is an important part of a flourishing human experience and vocation.

With the recent and sharp rise in the adoption of AI assistants, particular in fields formerly related to creative work, I felt the need to put forward my thoughts on the consequences of AI usage for human creativity. I argue that while AI assistants embody a huge amount of promise in terms of making creative production easier, there are tradeoffs and dangers involved in their use, particularly for our human faculties that we prize most highly.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic there was a lot of discussion around the place of church in public life during quarantine. Online-only services started to pop up, prompting the question for many of when church would make the jump to a completely virtual reality. I wrote this article to explore some of the philosophical and theological foundations of VR and what "VR church" might even mean as a concept. Spoiler alert: I'm not bullish on VR church!

Together with Matt Germonprez and Sean Goggins, I published this paper in First Monday, a peer-reviewed journal devoted to the topic of the Internet. The abstract is as follows:

I was a guest on this StackOverflow Podcast, where we discussed open source community health, the philosophy of technology, and music. I played a bit of live music for the show, and the full version of the song I played is also available online: When There Was Still Code to Write (Ukulele Version).

As someone who works as a professional in the field of software automation and automation tools, I wanted to apply some critical philosophy of technology to the specific topic of automation. This SauceCon 2017 keynote talk was a perfect opportunity for such reflection! It culminated in a completely automated performance of a song I wrote with Appium driving various instruments including a text-to-speech synthesizer. Kind of spooky, actually!

My first foray into the philosophy of technology was via the work of Albert Borgmann, and specifically his book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. His ideas were so powerful and fruitful for me that I wanted to get to know them more intimately as well as to make them more easily accessible to non-philosophers. And so I set out to blog through each chapter of his book, summarizing and explicating the important points. Ultimately, this work even opened up the possibility to meet the man himself, and to have the wonderful opportunity to interview Albert at his home in Montana.

In 2015 I attended the annual conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology, in an attempt to learn more about the field of philosophy of technology. I gave this paper at the conference, discussing Albert Borgmann's "Device Paradigm" in conjunction with open source software.

This was my first opportunity to give a presentation at a tech conference that wasn't about a technical topic. Instead, I got to share some of my thoughts (and worries) about the place of technology in our broader lives. In this presentation I tried to elucidate the concept of the "Device Paradigm" and explain why it mattered to us as practitioners of technology. It was also fun to build a realtime demo where attendees could write how they're feeling and have it float across the screen, while I performed an original song written for the event!

There is a class of arguments for cosmic design which aim to put the design hypothesis at better than chance by pointing at apparently finely-tuned aspects of our universe (without which "higher" life forms like ourselves, or any life at all, would not exist). A common objection to such arguments says that, given our lack of non-finely-tuned universes to compare against, design inferences are barred as a result of an observation selection effect. This paper attempts to defeat that objection (while, it must be said, not offering any additional support to the fine-tuning argument itself).