Bio

I help senior leaders put AI ethics into practice so they can mitigate risk and earn trust. Articles, a crash course on AI ethics, and more: reidblackman.com The longer version... It took one philosophy course my first semester in college to reveal I didn’t have a damn clue what I was talking about. So I started studying. A lot. Ten years later, armed with the training a Ph.D. requires, I became a philosophy professor. I taught, researched, and published on ethics, free will, Nietzsche, and the emotions for another ten years. During that time I also started a fireworks wholesaling company (grad school doesn’t pay very well!), mentored startups, and taught and researched emerging tech ethics, medical ethics, environmental ethics, and corporate ethics. As my time in the ivory tower continued, I was increasingly looking outside it. What I saw, just like everyone else, was the #MeToo movement, #BlackLivesMatter, #DeleteFacebook, #DeleteUber. I saw engineers ringing the alarm bells around the massive societal impacts of artificial intelligence. I saw new generations of consumers and employees holding businesses to higher ethical standards. And I thought, ‘I can help with that…’ Now I work with senior leaders to develop and deploy strategies that identify and solve for ethical red flags, from my work with Deloitte on developing and deploying ethically safe AI to devising strategies that weave ethics into the cultures of companies experiencing explosive growth.