Hey. I’m Gretta.

How are the last days of the Anthropocene Era treating you?

I know, it seems like only yesterday we were chipping hand axes from flint and trying to figure out how to start fires on purpose, and look at us now! We had an agricultural revolution, an industrial revolution, and now we’re on the brink of our final revolution, the one that will usher in machines that are better at planning, steering, and shaping the future than we are.

We seem to be in an awfully big hurry, and we’re probably going to botch the job and give over the universe to something coldly alien that values none of what I value. From where I sit, it looks like humans will probably go extinct within my natural lifespan.

My goal is to eke out a bit more time for humans first, if I can. If we launch the Technocene too soon, it’ll be a bleak and desolate future. Let’s not do that. Let’s take our time and get it right.

What’s My Deal?

Here are some of the things I’ve done for work:

  • I ran the Communications department at MIRI (the Machine Intelligence Research Institute) for half of 2023 and most of 2024. I scaled it up from one person to six and helped execute some of the trickiest parts of MIRI’s pivot from technical alignment research to focusing on comms and policy.

  • In 2019, I founded a small psychotherapy practice where I was the head therapist and I managed a few others. I specialized in relationship and sex therapy and especially in high-conflict couples therapy.

  • I led a few different teams at Google between 2007 and 2015.

    • I co-managed Analytics SRE for a while; we ran massive backend processing pipelines, a complex frontend interface, and the highest qps service at Google at that time. We completely rearchitected the backend to run continuously and consistently across multiple data centers with smooth failover and executed a flawless migration to the new system. Meanwhile we kept that very high qps service at five nines of uptime over multiple years. Still proud of that.

    • Later, I owned map data quality for Google Maps. It was literally my job to make sure the map matched the territory as much as possible. This job required as much people engineering as software engineering. By the time I left Google I was running five engineering teams across three Google sites and two continents.

You might notice that these things don’t obviously follow one from the other.

Software engineering, site reliability, psychotherapy, communications…

What all of these things have in common is that they’re hella complicated and they involve systems thinking. I am fascinated by gnarly systems that don’t work quite right. I like to tinker with them and figure out why they’re like that, and then I like to take them apart and put them back together better.

Until now I’ve mostly worked on small systems like a single polycule or all of Google Analytics. Now I’m working on the political and psychological machinery of the entire human race. Wish me luck!

My Current Projects

Human Psychology in the Face of Superintelligence

Humans reason best about familiar, non-threatening subjects. When they try to contemplate events that have never happened before, that are completely unlike anything they’ve ever seen, and that have the power to upend nearly everything, most humans don’t do well.

I’m studying what people’s brains do when they begin to contemplate superintelligence for the first time. I’ve seen denial, anger, fear, grief, depression — the full range of emotions and coping strategies.

Most of the people I know doing outreach about AI, including my colleagues at MIRI, are focusing on the logical arguments, the reasoning, “rationality.” I’m trying something else: I’m trying to understand human responses more holistically, with a view to getting something sane to happen even in a fundamentally insane world.

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares are writing a book, tentatively out September of 2025. My side gig is to help them get that book into the hands of as many people as possible. I remain a part of MIRI’s comms department in service of that goal.

Probably worth mentioning that Eliezer Yudkowsky is my primary consort, and I’m his. Here we are on a date. He likes to keep a low profile when we’re in public, as you can see.