Jan H. Wasserziehr

I am a political philosopher working at the intersection of critical theory and the philosophy of AI. I am especially interested in the relationship between technical progress and:

• modern ideas of human freedom; and
• human cognition, reason, and autonomy.

I am completing a PhD in Political Theory at the London School of Economics, supervised by Katrin Flikschuh and advised by Lea Ypi. My thesis, Fleeting Freedom: Technical Progress and the Fate of Modernity, is an enquiry into the ambiguities immanent to the modern project to ground human freedom in technical progress and the domination of nature.

Alongside the thesis, I work on the ethics of artificial consciousness, and in particular on the question of whether artificial systems could have moral status.

I was previously a visiting scholar at Columbia University and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Before the PhD, I worked for three years at a political consultancy in Berlin.