AI, Governance, and the Human Consequences of Design
Consulting & Advisory
I work with organisations at the intersection of psychology, technology and public life, helping them understand what happens when AI moves from technical system to everyday infrastructure. My focus is on the point at which technology begins to shape behaviour, judgement, trust, identity and care.
Responsible AI is often framed through principles such as fairness, transparency and accountability. These matter. The harder questions begin when principles meet real products, real institutions and real people. I work in that gap — translating psychological and human risk into practical decisions about design, governance and strategy.
What I do
I help organisations anticipate and mitigate the human and psychological risks of AI, particularly where systems may affect vulnerable users, encourage dependency, alter judgement or trust, or automate decisions previously made through human relationships and care.
The aim is to surface these risks early enough to shape product, policy and governance decisions before they become embedded in systems and harder to reverse.
- Human Risk Assessment for AI Products: Evaluation of use-cases, prompts, UX language, and deployment context to identify psychological harm, dependency, and misuse risks, with practical mitigation recommendations.
- Pre-Launch Human Safety Review: Rapid review of high-risk features or applications before release, producing a go/no-go memo and required changes.
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Advisory & Strategy: Ongoing advisory support for product, policy, and leadership teams on psychologically informed AI governance.
- Additional areas of support:
- Psychologically informed governance and internal guidance
- Ethical risk arising from defaults, incentives and product architecture
- Vulnerable-user and emotional-reliance considerations trust, judgement and human oversight
- Policy and organisational responses to emerging AI risks
- Engagements are strategic and advisory.
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My advisory work is grounded in active research and ongoing engagement with how people actually experience emerging technologies — not only how those systems are intended to work.
My forthcoming book, The Algorithmic State, examines how economic, political and technological systems shape attention, behaviour and inner life. The research behind it provides a wider historical and institutional lens on AI risk — connecting product-level decisions to the incentives, systems and forms of governance in which they sit. My ongoing research examines young adults’ lived experiences of using generative AI for emotional support, including questions of trust, reassurance, dependency, disclosure and machine-mediated care.
- Together, these strands allow me to move between the individual, the product and the wider system — identifying risks that may be technically unobjectionable but psychologically or socially consequential.
Non-Fiction
The Algorithmic Mind
The Algorithmic State begins with a reversal: it has become more profitable to redesign people than to repair what makes them anxious, distracted, exhausted and alone. It traces how the market’s imperatives—to measure, rank, optimise and extract—were written into code, and how that code became an environment that trains attention, desire and behaviour through the nervous system. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience and political economy, it shows how distress is recast as personal failure, then sold back as treatment, resilience and self-improvement. It asks how to reclaim our time, agency, relationships and capacity to stand down.
Fiction
Borderless
Borderless (2026) is a literary novel about the seduction of reinvention. When Charlotte Hughes leaves London for India, she imagines she can escape the borders that have shaped her life—of nation, class, ambition and identity. Instead, she discovers that every crossing creates new boundaries, and every search for freedom carries its own forms of exile. Spanning Delhi, Bangalore, Goa and the Himalayan foothills, Borderless is an exploration of love, power, belonging and the uneasy freedoms of contemporary global life.
What feels personal is often designed
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