Ethical Systems & Trust Architecture for High-Stakes Technologies
I help organizations design, evaluate, and govern high-impact socio-technical systems (AI models, platforms, and institutions) so they are not only effective but worthy of human trust. My work is grounded in a scientifically informed engineering and design-inspired paradigm for ethics that treats real-world moral life as dynamic, multi-scale, and system-shaped: a terrain of incentives, feedback loops, power asymmetries, and long-tail edge cases. That paradigm gives teams sharper tools than “ethics checklists”: tools that anticipate failure modes, clarify value tradeoffs, and turn principles into operational decisions.
If you’re building systems that affect people at scale (especially people most exposed to institutional and technological harms), I bring a rare combination of rigorous moral theory, systems thinking, and design-minded measurement to help you ship responsibly and sustainably.
Strong fit for: Responsible AI, Trust & Safety Strategy, Integrity/Evaluation, AI Governance & Risk, Policy Design (Well-being).
Ways I Help
I translate values into decision-ready tools that hold up under complexity.
• Responsible AI / Trust & Safety Frameworks
I build evaluation criteria, harm taxonomies, escalation pathways, and governance guardrails—so organizations can reason clearly about risk, set principled boundaries, and respond consistently under pressure.
• Socio-Technical Risk & Ecosystem Analysis
I model how system behavior changes over time once it enters the real world: incentive gradients, feedback loops, emergent group dynamics, and downstream effects. This helps teams avoid “local fixes” that create global harms.
• Fairness & Robustness Under Perspective Shifts
I bring a symmetry-based approach to objectivity: fairness and trustworthiness should remain stable when we change whose standpoint we center, which populations we evaluate on, and what contextual frames matter. This supports more reliable evaluation across cultures, demographics, and deployment contexts.
• Operationalizing Well-Being, Dignity, and Agency
I develop measurement-minded ethical wayfinding tools—compasses, scorecards, and metrics—so teams can track well-being and dignity impacts over time without flattening them into a single number.
• Red-Line Constraints (“Ethical Swampland” Prevention)
I help define principled “do-not-build / do-not-ship” regions of design space: systems that may perform well on surface metrics while violating non-negotiable constraints like dignity, non-domination, or justice.
Typical Projects
Here are concrete ways this work shows up inside organizations:
1) Safety & Integrity Evaluation Design
- Create evaluation plans that cover long-tail harms, adversarial dynamics, and demographic/cultural robustness
- Define what “safe enough” means for a specific context, and how to monitor it post-launch
2) Trust & Safety Policy Architecture
- Develop policy principles that are consistent, auditable, and aligned with real-world constraints
- Build decision trees, escalation systems, documentation standards, and reviewer guidance that reduce drift and inconsistency
3) Systemic Harm & Feedback Loop Diagnosis
- Map how incentives and mechanisms (ranking, recommendation, monetization, automation) shape emergent harm patterns
- Identify leverage points where small changes yield large improvements in ecosystem health
4) Well-Being & Dignity Measurement Tooling
- Design “good life” compasses/scorecards appropriate to product goals and user populations
- Build ethically grounded metrics frameworks teams can iterate on (including qualitative + quantitative blends)
5) Governance & Red-Lines for New Capabilities
- Define constraints for deployment and iteration (what must remain invariant as systems scale)
- Draft governance language that product, legal, and research stakeholders can actually use
Outcomes
What teams get from working with me:
• Clearer decisions under uncertainty
Frameworks that reduce “values theater” and make tradeoffs explicit and accountable.
• Fewer surprises after launch
Earlier detection of systemic risks and long-tail harm pathways.
• More durable trust
Governance and evaluation that remain stable under changing contexts, incentives, and pressures.
• Better alignment between mission and metrics
Practical measurement tools for well-being, dignity, and agency—usable for iteration, not just reports.
• Stronger legitimacy with stakeholders
A margin-centering, justice-aware approach that is accountable to those most vulnerable to harm.
Portfolio Highlights
Ethical Field Theory for AI & Platforms
A field-theoretic framework modeling ethical dynamics as coupled dimensions (rightness, goodness, virtue) that helps teams reason about interactions, tradeoffs, and emergent harms.
Ethosystem Theory: AI & Platforms in Full Human Context
A multi-scale systems framework for understanding how AI interacts with psycho-social, economic, political, and ecological environments—and how interventions propagate through those environments over time.
Ethical Swampland: Symmetry-Based Red-Lines for Fairness & Robustness in System Design
A constraint-based approach to identifying high-performing system designs that should never be built or shipped because they violate non-negotiable ethical conditions. It is built on a principled approach to objectivity as invariance under transformations (including standpoint shifts), supporting fairness and evaluation protocols that generalize across populations and contexts.
Measurement-Minded Ethical Wayfinding
Design-driven tools for operationalizing ethical reflection: compasses, scorecards, and metrics that help teams track dignity, agency, and flourishing over time.
Let's Talk
If you’re hiring or building in any of the following areas, I’d love to connect:
Responsible AI • Trust & Safety • Policy Design • Integrity & Evaluation • Risk/Governance • Human Well-being
I’m open to full-time roles and research collaboration.
Email: ssanchezb1@gmail.com