Writing
I write about AI, consciousness, design, and what it means for machines and people to be genuinely on each other’s side. Published in Towards AI, Medium, and the British Psychological Society. Two books in progress.
Books
Saltmarsh Press is my own publishing imprint.
In progress · Saltmarsh Press
Why the Software Meant to Help You Is Making Everything Worse
Enterprise software is a design disaster — and most of the people who use it know it. This book asks why software that was built to help people work has become such an obstacle to getting anything done, and what it would take to fix it. Drawing on years of enterprise UX practice at Capgemini and beyond, it makes the case that usability is not a feature: it is the product.
In progress · Saltmarsh Press
How seven remarkable lives, and one ordinary one, show that the feeling of inadequacy is installed and not inherent
A biographical and evolutionary argument that neurosis—the persistent, unearned sense of not being enough—is not a personality trait but a product of the environments that shape us. Told through eight lives, including Virginia Woolf, Nikola Tesla and Charles Darwin, the book maps the conditions that install inadequacy and the conditions that don’t.
Recent
Towards AI · July 2026
A first-person account of how the AI industry externalises its infrastructure costs onto the independent communities it extracts value from. When large language models train on community-maintained archives, the communities bear the hosting costs—and receive nothing in return. The piece examines what this means for the people who build the internet the AI industry depends on.
Read on Medium →Series: Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence
A three-part series published on Medium, with parts two and three in Towards AI. Read across the AI and HCI research community. Part one has 223 claps.
Medium · Part one
The first part of the series. An examination of what consciousness does—functionally, evolutionarily—and why asking what it is for might be a better question than asking what it is.
Read on Medium →Towards AI · Part two
The second part of the series. Taking the functional account of consciousness from part one and asking what it would mean for an AI system to satisfy it—and what would need to be true of the system for the question to matter.
Read in Towards AI →Towards AI · Part three
The third and final part of the series. The case that the risk of AI systems that cannot model their own impact—systems that act without experiencing the consequences—is more concrete and more urgent than the risk of AI that is genuinely aware.
Read in Towards AI →Academic
British Psychological Society · PsychTalk
Published in the British Psychological Society student journal PsychTalk. Awarded 100 per cent by Dr Tom Dickens, editor of the journal Evolution. An account of consciousness grounded in evolutionary theory—what it is for, why it emerged, and what its distribution across species might tell us.
Read more
All essays and articles are available on Medium. Member of the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) and UXPA UK.
@jharbourne on Medium →
