About
My research interest is the political economy of sustainability, or homeostasis in a system kept far from equilibrium by a constant supply of solar radiation, and how the polycrisis and metacrisis manifest as evidence of the challenges maintaining homeostasis for all humanity (a perspective inspired by Buckminster Fuller). This research is informed by energy, material, and financial flows, and by cybernetic regulation.
My introduction to cybernetics came from reading Dan Davies’s The Unaccountability Machine, shortly after it was published in April 2024.
My AI consulting practice is Intelligence Amplified.
Education and research
- Global Energy MBA, Warwick Business School, 2014 — dissertation on green infrastructure finance and the securitisation of energy-efficiency and distributed-generation projects
- Master’s in environmental policy, London School of Economics, 2008
- Master’s in sustainable energy, University College Cork, 2007
- Research into solid oxide fuel cells, EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne), 1999
- Honours degree in Industrial Chemistry, University of Limerick, 1996, including a year in R&D with Loctite in Ireland and the US
The programme
It starts with Lotka’s World Engine (1925) and runs to today’s AI through Cybernetics, in pursuit of a political economy of sustainability in a complex evolving system.
- Thermodynamics — Lotka 1925, the World Engine
- Cybernetics — Ashby 1956, regulation → today’s AI
- Political Economy — Keen 1995, sustainability · a complex evolving system
Research and writing
Elsewhere
Intelligence Amplified — my AI consulting practice.
TSOEL — The Science of Economics Laboratory, for complex systems and agent-based modelling.