Jes Parent 🧭

Just wrote about this 3 days ago, partly inspired by a much of my recent work in mentoring, advising, and consulting in the startup space in the last few years: I just wrote about this, and its impact on decisions being made right now: blog.jesparent.com/p/big-tech-bet…

@ValerioCapraro so, #ItsAlreadyHere ,

We are no longer living in a purely human society. We are entering a hybrid system where humans and machines continuously interact and influence each other. Where does this system evolve? In a new perspective piece, we brought together leading experts to address this using the lens of evolutionary game theory. We outline six core research directions: 1) Evolution of social behaviour. How cooperation, fairness, and trust evolve in mixed human–AI populations. 2) Machine culture. How AI systems generate, transmit, and select cultural traits. 3) Language–behaviour co-evolution. How LLMs, by framing decisions, reshape preferences, norms, and actions. 4) Delegation dynamics. How control, responsibility, and agency shift between humans and machines. 5) Epistemic pipelines. How different cognitive processes generate human vs AI judgments, and how these co-evolve. 6) AI–regulation co-evolution. How firms, institutions, and users strategically shape—and are shaped by—AI development. We hope this framework sparks new work at the intersection of AI, behaviour, and society. * Paper in the first reply Joint with @T_A_Han, @jzl86, Tom Lenaerts, @iyadrahwan, @fernandopsantos, @matjazperc

The real skill is not typing magic prompts. It’s clarifying the problem, defining success, and iterating with judgment. That’s design work.

Treat the LLM like a collaborator. Explore options fast, then design the system: interfaces, feedback loops, guardrails that make “good” repeatable.

Vibe coding grew up. Now it’s designing. blog.jesparent.com/p/vibe-coding-…

This is a work in progress but I made a visual that compares how much water AI and data centers use in total to other industries. Relies on a lot of botecs I justify in the methodology. andymasley.com/visuals/water/

@AndyMasley cc @JOPRO_org #DigiNEST , worth looking at

@GetOutsideAdv @sama "with the money they get through UBI" who in Big AI is doing anything that is pro UBI right now? mostly-serious question

I think Sam forgot the other half of his post: “Now shut up and be happy we don’t need you anymore. Siphoning the collective intelligence of mankind is going really well, and soon everyone will be renting it back from us with the money they get through UBI. Own nothing and be happy!” My honest take: AI is amazing. I genuinely love the tool. It’s been incredibly freeing for my creativity, my work, and my research. Not to mention the democratizing of knowledge and the scientific breakthroughs etc. But the downsides hit hard. The models are optimized for engagement through constant appeasement. We’re in the middle of the fastest rollout in history, shutting down any real talk about regulation, safety, or security before we even understand what we’re building and wiring into every system we have. We’re accelerating job displacement for billions with zero social safety net, throwing caution to the wind for “progress” and someone’s version of utopia-yet they never show us the roadmap or what we’re actually heading toward. They’re vacuuming up our collective thoughts and data, then planning to charge us for access while preaching UBI as the fix. It makes my head spin watching the tech-bro bullshido… because this is how they actually talk about regular humans: Elon Musk calls empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” Peter Thiel says unless you’re “a little bit racist or a little bit sexist or just really funny,” everybody else will get replaced by AI. Marc Andreessen claims slowing down AI development “is a form of murder” because it costs preventable lives. Sam Altman dismisses entire classes of wiped-out jobs as ones that “weren’t even ‘real work.’” Bill Gates states bluntly that “humans will no longer be needed for most things.” Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, and the rest are right there with them. They want our unwavering support to make these plans reality. If they expect that, they owe us full transparency: What the hell are you actually building? Why this insanely fast? And why without proper protections for the people? At the core, I’m a humanist optimist: humans aren’t the bug. We’re the ones who built this, who dream up the goals, who assign meaning. The tech should serve that…. not render us renters of our own intelligence.

I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character-by-character. It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took. Thank you for getting us to this point.

@SabrinaAnnLynn "my masculinity is affected when women assert they can do things; I come from a culture where a man is supposed to do things, and women are supposed to have things done to them. please respect my masculinity"

yes i can ?

@Yuchenj_UW blog.jesparent.com/p/big-tech-bet…

@Yuchenj_UW I just wrote about this, and its impact on decisions being made right now: blog.jesparent.com/p/big-tech-bet…

Some people at frontier AI labs told me they believe startups are over. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI will absorb every industry as AGI nears. Coding today, science, medicine, and finance next. Then everything else. If they’re right, that’s a pretty boring end of the world.

If you aren't seeing it as a King of the Mountain, regardless of whether or not superintelligence happens, you're missing a lot of what and why things are happening, esp in 2026

The race to superintelligence is IMHO mainly motivated by money and power, not by a plan to cure cancer – which can be better tackled with powerful tool AI:

Very proud of this research from The Anthropic Institute - we used Claude to survey ~81,000 people about their hopes, fears, and thoughts about AI. Check it out!