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About

I’m Max Kirchoff, the sole writer for Human Of The Loop. I’m a CTO with 20 years of broad experience in tech - currently, mostly in applied AI - and a philosophy degree I never quite finished. I’ve spent my career at the intersection of messy problems, whether that was fraud detection, healthcare platforms, data architecture, developer infrastructure. I’ve always been drawn to where different domains collide and the real complexity lives.

I build with and for AI systems daily. I understand what they can and cannot do. I know the technical reality behind the hype. But I also spent years studying philosophy, learning to step outside systems and ask harder questions than “does it work?” I can see both what these technologies enable and what they’re doing to how we think, work, and understand ourselves.

I’m inside the loop, but I’m working to maintain critical perspective. I’m writing to make sense of this moment, to explore where disruption and harm actually happen (not where we’re told to look), and to understand what this technology does to us as humans.

I don’t have all the answers. I’m here as much to explore as to share. But if you’re looking for thinking that bridges the technical and the human, that understands the systems from the inside while questioning them from the outside, this might be for you.

This is Human of the Loop, a space for clearer thinking about AI from someone who builds with it but refuses to stop asking what it costs us.

Acknowledgements

I just wanted to thank a few people who were instrumental in me starting this. They are the ones who have had heavy influence on me starting this, whether they intended to or not.

Thank you to Sam Keen, whose writing, curating, and building on Altered Craft (go pay him to subscribe!) is highly valuable to me as an engineer and inspired me to think more deeply about how I could contribute to the conversation about AI. While we are writing about very different aspects of AI, I highly value his work and drive. He also is one of the first engineers I worked with, over a decade ago, who would regularly have new things to teach me.

Thank you to Luis Palomares, who hounded me to explore generative AI since the big LLM models exploded onto the scene. Despite my insistence that this was a fad, he got to me eventually. Thanks for being such a curious and brilliant colleague & friend. The number of projects you have going at any one time still amazes me.

Thank you to Steven Karaiskos, a friend who makes me feel like I have something important to share. We all deserve a friend like that. Steven’s work in supporting kids and teens after loss to suicide is inspiring, and his dedication to those who need his work reminds me of the determination we are all capable of.

Thank you to Megan Saxelby, as I mentioned above, my spouse and editor here. The conversations we have standing in the kitchen while our kids are destroying our living room are the deepest, most meaningful, dorkiest & intellectually stimulating moments in my life. Your work at Wild Feelings, and your relentless passion to make adolescence better for everyone, is a real inspiration. Thank you for sharing your wealth of knowledge, wisdom, and deep intellect with me every day.