Camille Fassett

Hello! I'm Camille, and welcome to my sliver of the internet. I work on making good robots at Pantograph.

AI, like most technologies, has the potential to expand human agency and improve quality of life, and also the potential to centralize power. One reason I work on robotics is that I think we're approaching another technological inflection point. The technologies I'm most excited about don't just solve problems for people; they expand what people are capable of doing themselves and they open up new ways of relating. The internet, open-source software, and inexpensive fabrication tools all dramatically increased what a single person or small group could build. I hope general purpose robotics belongs in that lineage.

If we get it right, robotics could reduce scarcity, accelerate science, and make it dramatically easier for people to shape the physical world around them. It could lower the cost of building homes, restoring ecosystems, constructing infrastructure, and make beautiful things, like treehouses and gardens.

I came to many of my beliefs through my early experiences with the internet. I had unrestricted access to the internet from a young age, and it was unequivocally good for me. For a time, it felt like the internet fundamentally changed how people could relate to one another. You could stumble into obscure communities, talk to strangers on the other side of the world, and watch history unfold in real time. Ordinary people suddenly had new ways to participate in the world, and this was very formative. I'm sad that version of the internet is mostly gone, but I'm also optimistic that technology can still expand what ordinary people are able to do in new ways.

Some of my interests:

• Movement in the mountains. I love exploring wild places, especially through trail running (despite the toenails it has cost me). Moving through consequential terrain is an exercise in self-trust, autonomy, and independence. Also, I think I for one am a better and more calibrated person when I occasionally encounter some primal and tangible challenges, like exposure, the weather, or a bear. I'm always excited about beta for new routes that are ambitiously doable in a day, especially in California or the West Coast. I once ran a marathon stopping at every Taco Bell in San Francisco; it made the local news.
• Philosophy, in particular, philosophy that asks what kind of people and ways of life are produced by systems, processes, and tools. I am interested in how our environments — social, technological, and institutional — shape what people are able to do, become, and imagine, questions explored by Aristotle, Spinoza, Foucault, James C. Scott, and many others.
• Stewardship and governance. I'm really interested in how we share places and resources, and how we care for other species. I closely follow the California condor population in central California, and the reintroduction of wolves and grizzlies to their native ranges. I think a lot about the values underneath these questions — whether species have rights at a collective level, the inherent value of biodiversity. In another life (or maybe a future one?) I would have gone into water policy or space policy.

In a former life, I was a data journalist at the Associated Press, where I built tools for investigative journalism and covered stories through data, especially about energy and infrastructure. You can see my author page at the AP here.

I also helped companies understand the real-world emissions consequences of their energy decisions at WattTime. I was a data science fellow at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), a venture capital fellow at Third Sphere, and developed privacy-preserving tools for journalists and whistleblowers at Freedom of the Press Foundation. I studied environmental science and resource management at UC Berkeley.

I live in San Francisco. Being loudly me online has been a good way to find my people historically, so if any of this resonates, feel free to send me an email.