Anselm Hook

Background

About Anselm Hook

I’m driven by the question: how can we help people “see” better? Can our tools make the invisible visible? Help us with our lives? Model consequences, anticipate change, build solidarity around the difficult choices we face in protecting life and diversity on this planet? The hybrid of human and machine reasoning seems necessary to deal with our own lives, to filter bad actors, to help us reason collectively, to see our role in a wider world.I began my career by writing video games with friends, eventually working on titles for EA. Since then, I’ve led projects in multiplayer augmented reality, social predictive modeling, and city-scale simulation — at Xerox PARC, in the Mozilla Research Lab, at Dekko (AR 3D reconstruction and tracking), and at Living Cities and https://orbital.foundation.Now, at https://companionintelligence.com, we’re building deep-knowledge, secure personal assistants that help people understand their own lives and communities, providing meaningful, actionable, context-aware decision support. We’ve also built an embodied 3D puppet that uses facial expressions and body language to make human–machine conversations feel more natural and engaging.There are a few public contributions here and there: I’ve spoken on intelligent agents and empathy at the Augmented World Expo explored the social nature of money in a talk on digital currencies for Mozilla and imagined creative futures with gestural interfaces in an earlier, more playful talk I also co-founded Makerlab, WhereCamp, ARDevCamp, and the Future-Of Conference [https://future-of.web.app/].Crypto has felt meaningful to me, allowing communities to have unstoppable conversations if you consider that voting and money are also forms of conversation. I tend not to be a fan of speculative crypto or hyper-liquidity and prefer a rhizomatic ecosystems approach with friction between tokens. I'm a recent fan of this video which I think summarizes the important role of technology in protecting privacy: I taught Ethereum programming at PNCA, and contributed to early crypto projects notably PGP and OpenBSD.Outside of work, I’m passionate about exploring our planet — have become utterly captivated by scuba diving most recently. I’m proud to be supporting Emergent Reefs that is using several 'systems approach' strategies to protect reefs.