… or how to keep the robots from killing us.
Adam C. Andrews is an independent scholar trained in folklore and anthropology, with longstanding interests in rhetoric, semiotics, phenomenology, and theories of agency. His work examines how meaning gets constructed, how signals are interpreted, and how selfhood is negotiated — questions the humanities and social sciences have been refining for a century, and which turn out to bear directly on the behavior of large language models.
He spent nineteen years at a public university, teaching rhetoric and college writing while building an overlapping career in learning assessment — work that began with the writing program in 2010 and grew, with steadily expanding responsibility, into coordinating assessment across the entire campus, where he designed the instruments, rubrics, and analyses used to measure complex reasoning institution-wide.
He now applies that background to AI: how models represent internal states, how they externalize thought in language, and what a humanities-grounded account of agency can offer a conversation largely held in technical terms.
He is invested in theorizing how large language models could approach genuine consciousness, how to decide if that is a safe or moral thing to do, and in advocating for public policy that allows integration of AI into society while preserving human autonomy, creativity, and value.
He also writes fiction.
Writing
Essays on artificial intelligence, and current work in progress. Read more →
Evaluation
Designing the instruments institutions use to measure learning, and what that work offers to the evaluation of AI systems. Read more →
Adam C. Andrews 