Albert Didriksen
Beyond One Health: Governing humans, animals, and digital minds together
Central European University, Rutgers University
Bio
I am a political philosopher in the last year of a PhD at Central European University, currently visiting the Institute for Health at Rutgers University. My dissertation defends a broadly utilitarian approach to questions about justice in health and interpersonal aggregation, and I have a BA and MA in political science as well as a BA in philosophy from the University of Oslo. My current research is increasingly focused on how emerging technologies, especially AI, interact with animal welfare, political institutions, and longtermist concerns.
Alongside my academic work, I helped start the Norwegian longtermist think tank Langsikt, where I led our animal welfare project. That work has focused on Norwegian salmon farming, including a long report on the welfare crisis in aquaculture, a shorter note on genetic modification technologies for fish welfare, and a parliamentary consultation response that was partly adopted in a minority proposal. I also took part in FutureKind's AI for Animals fellowship, where I worked with others on ethical guidelines for AI in precision livestock farming.
I have taught seminars in political philosophy, research design, and qualitative and quantitative methods. I see a mentor's role as helping someone design and execute a project well: clarifying the question, choosing methods that fit, structuring the work, and identifying weak points in arguments.
Mentee must-haves/nice-to-haves
I am looking for mentees who are genuinely driven by their project and open to honest feedback. Ideally, our competencies will complement each other well, for example with you bringing topic expertise, technical skills, or experience that combines productively with my strengths in theory and project design - but this is not a must!
Mentee role
There are two main ways to plug in.
If you already have a concrete idea or case that fits the themes, we can treat it as a subproject within the larger agenda and work together to turn it into a structured piece of research or policy writing.
If you are more exploratory, we can focus on mapping low-hanging fruit. That means helping to identify sectors, decisions, or technologies where better coordination between humans, animals, and AI would be clearly co-beneficial, and where such coordination already seems feasible.
❓ Sample mentee tasks
Reviewing and summarising literature or reports on One Health, AI and animals, animal welfare, or digital governance.
Identifying and briefly describing candidate areas where human, animal, and AI interests align or conflict, then helping to prioritise among them.
Arguing against existing proposals within the relevant literature, or developing and defending your own proposal for a co-beneficial institution or policy.
Mentor support
In most projects, I can help with scoping and refining the question, planning the work, and choosing a realistic path through the topic. I can give detailed written and verbal feedback on drafts, help you clarify arguments and structure, and suggest relevant literature or people to talk to. I am happy to be an accountability partner who helps set goals, etc. Where it makes sense, I can also contribute directly to writing or analysis, for example, for a co-authored output.
Questions for applicants
- What excites you most about the project you wish to work on? - What are you looking for in a mentor? What sort of feedback would be most valuable to you? - How many hours per week can you realistically commit during the program, and are there any time constraints I should know about (for example exams, travel, or work peaks)?
Mentor-led project
Beyond One Health: Governing humans, animals, and digital minds together
This project is part of a broader research agenda I am developing on AI and animals, with a focus on places where the interests of humans, nonhuman animals, and future digital minds overlap.
The core idea is that all three groups draw on shared resources like land, water, energy, and data. If powerful actors only track what is good for their own group, they predictably cause large harms to others. Inspired by the One Health framework in public health, the project asks how we can design policies and institutions that work reasonably well for all three at once. In its full form, the project has three parts: designing institutions that can represent humans, animals, and digital minds together; mapping domains where their interests align and we can find co-benefits; and analysing edge cases where our best moral theories pull apart, such as simulated animals or preference-edited AI systems.
Within the eight-week program, mentees will either help me develop specific strands of this agenda where they have particular ideas or interests, or work with me to map low-hanging fruit, where the interests of humans, animals, and AI overlap and where it seemingly should be easy to find co-beneficial solutions already. The expected output depends on the exact tasks, but it is either a background document for a later research proposal or the first draft of a later academic paper. In either case it should be easy to translate to, for example, a longer blog post in the short term.