Who I Am

Salutas, it is a pleasure to meet you! I am Daniel von Eschwege. Born and raised in South Africa with a German mother and Afrikaans father I often felt in between worlds, but also am very fortunate to have had access to both. My mother made raising me and my siblings her life’s work, and did so with lots of music, stories, arts & crafts, singing, and playing instruments, with a strong influence of German culture. My father, being a scientist and craftsman himself, taught us physics, woodwork, metalwork, farming, and sports from a young age.

I credit her with my love for literature, music, and art, a continued source of creative inspiration for the work I do. I credit him with instilling in us a sense of wonder about the universe and a spirit for discovery, in accordance with his philosophy of always answering our questions about reality in a truthful and scientific manner, no matter how young we were or how often we asked. I credit both my parents for teaching with love and through play, instead of through fear and control.

Last year I was doing my PhD while building the machine learning behind Autoscriber, and grew increasingly restless with both. While I believe in Autoscriber’s healthtech cause, I wanted to do more fundamental research, specifically on aligning AI and humanity. Furthermore, I missed the “real-atoms” work from my Bachelor in electronic engineering, and although my computational intelligence PhD was academically interesting, it was, well, only academically interesting. I remember being a best paper finalist at the SSCI conference, and while on stage thinking to myself, “Wow, this work I did is truly useless in the real world - we invented problems, invented solutions for them, adjudicated those based on invented benchmark sets, and now congratulate ourselves for that - and I’m no better”. Consequently, I quit at Autoscriber and dropped out from university.

At this stage I had no workable, specific idea whatsoever. But I knew with a burning intensity that I had to do work which was:

1. Fundamental, creative research. I want to know more about the universe, and I want to do something with that knowledge.

   
   

2. Know-it-when-you-see-it. I want to build something which needs no explanation. Both five year olds and eighty-five year olds must get it, not just experts sitting on some high tower of specialization.

   
   

3. A Lebensarbeit, a life’s work. I don’t want to hop between jobs for a CV, or for cash, or for a career. The work I do must be all-consuming, it must “become me” indefinitely, it must be what I breathe, eat and live.

   
   

4. For a higher purpose. It must keep the fire alive inherently by having a cause.

I then stripped away everything in my life which was not conducive to this mission, and dove deeply into all my truest interests, which crystallized around Superalignment. But not fear-based alignment by forcing AI into a box via regulatory suppression and restrictive top-down control, but instead by going beyond limitation via man-machine co-creation. Creative transcendence, informed by a deep understanding of neurotech, and psychology.

Why psychology? Because the more I research AI safety, the more I conclude that AI alignment is not an AI problem, but a human problem.

Thank you for your time, may we meet some day!

Daniel