Greetings! My name is Abraham Mhaidli. I am a junior research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, where I head the Technology Harm Prevention Group (colloquially known as the Alpaca group – Abraham’s Lab for Pessimistic Academics Concerned About Tech, with the T being silent).

Broadly speaking, I look at emerging technologies and try to see what are their harms and how can we mitigate these harms. More formally, I ask the following research questions: (1) what are the ethical, consumer, and societal harms of technologies; (2) how can they be designed so as to not cause harm; and (3) what are techniques we can use to better understand the technologies and harms that are to come.

Those are very broad topics and research areas. Recently, my work looks at the following:

• Extended Reality technologies
• Brain computer interfaces
• Ethical impact assessments and ethical development frameworks
• Scenario construction, speculative design, and design fiction.

Feel free to explore around my website! You can check out my publications in the publications tab, and if you are interested in working with me, please see the working with me tab! Finally, if you want to contact me, please check out the contact tab above. Thank you so much for stopping by!

PS This website is still under construction, so expect broken links, weird formatting issues, and more.