I’m Sam.

I’m interested in whether, contrary to popular belief, the future can be more human than the past. Recently, I have been asking myself: “how do we build institutions that take seriously the things we value but struggle to put a price on?”, “what would our civilisation look like if it was as concerned with depth of experience as it is with breadth of materiality?”, and correspondingly “what should we ask of powerful technologies?”

I’ve tried to let questions guide my career. I started out as a corporate lawyer in New York, because I was curious about how billion-dollar deals were, or weren’t, shaping the world. I then worked in VC and PE-backed early-stage companies and corporate venture arms as a founder and operator across a variety of domains, because I wanted to understand the ways and extents to which a small number of people armed with computer systems could respond to large ‘problem areas’.

As those domains converged around frontier AI, I joined the UK’s AI Safety (now Security) Institute in an attempt to understand if software could be truly intelligent and what that might mean for nations and their governments, industries, and societies. Most recently, I helped Scale AI build its public sector business across the UK and NATO, FVEY, and European member states, to try to find out how public-private commercial relationships, founded upon emerging technologies like applied AI, were becoming a crucible for global decision-making.

I live in London, where I was born, with my fiancée, Jenny. I like to play jazz saxophone, all sorts of sports from tennis to sailing, hiking in nature, and bringing people together at events to have conversations and experiences which we couldn’t have had on our own.