About
Juan-Pablo is a philosopher and cognitive scientist working on the issue of control: How do we exert control over our actions? What are the limits of that control? And what are the ethical and political implications of our limitations, as they intersect with social contexts and new technologies? He is Lecturer at the University of Southampton’s Department of Philosophy, and I lead the Self-Control in Context project (2022–2025).
His work currently focuses on two areas:
1. Understanding the link between self-control and poverty in the Global South. Most work on self-control has studied populations in the Global North. What can we learn from the nature of human agency and rationality by studying the skills and strategies people develop in a broader set of contexts? I develop this work by leading the Templeton-funded project Self-Control in Context.
2. Creating tools to design autonomy-supportive artificial intelligence. This involves identifying the ethical boundaries of AI-based influence, building a classification of mental harms, and building tools that developers and designers can use to check whether their AI systems support or hinder human autonomy.