Introduction
Milan Drago grew tired of hearing that ethics was important and then watching it appear only in the last slide of a product meeting. The words sounded serious; the design decisions had already been made.
Milan lives in Zurich and researches responsibility in AI systems. He came from philosophy, a field that often has to explain why it belongs in technical rooms.
Story of the Path into AI
Milan read early debates about autonomous systems and noticed how abstract responsibility remained. He wanted ethics to become concrete enough to change a product. Technical teams found philosophical language slow; some humanities colleagues saw AI only as threat. Milan learned enough machine learning to follow design discussions and interviewed developers about decisions they made under pressure.
His first project was a criteria catalogue for explainable rejections in automated administrative processes. The first version sounded too elegant. A developer asked which field in the interface should change. Milan rewrote the catalogue into product questions: What reason is shown? Can a person appeal? Who reviews the edge case?
Current Work
Today Milan combines research with workshops for companies and public projects. In one performance-evaluation tool, he asked not only about accuracy but about complaint routes, power asymmetry and whether people would know how to contest an output.
His workshops succeed when they lead to product changes rather than polished mission statements. Milan values philosophy most when it becomes operational without losing its seriousness. Ethics should not become a rubber stamp. It should become a design constraint people can argue with.
Personal Advice
“Ethics has to become concrete enough that a developer builds something differently tomorrow,” Milan says. He advises humanities graduates entering AI to learn the technical vocabulary without giving up sharper questions.
Key Facts
Age and place: 28, Zurich.
Background: humanities entry, international research, translation work.
Entry into AI: criteria catalogue for explainable administrative rejections.
Focus today: responsible AI.
Typical tools: ethics frameworks, interviews, design reviews.
Werkstattnotiz
Milan’s favourite workshop note is a single arrow from “principle” to “button.” It looks naive and is hard to complete. He is now collecting cases where ethical language changed an interface, not just a policy document.