We are good, in these spaces, at studying what survived. We are good at the visions that kept their audiences and the projects that kept their funding, and at reading off their features as if they were a recipe. We are much worse, perhaps curiously worse, at the other half of the ledger: the things that were tried and went nowhere, and the specific reasons they went nowhere.

I’ve come to think that’s backwards, or at least substantially incomplete. In an information-incomplete situation, which is what we’re dealing with as we navigate towards the future, we tend to know what doesn’t work with far more confidence than we know what will. The failures are the more reliable data, and sometimes the only data. We just don’t keep them.

This piece is an attempt to describe that absence precisely enough to be useful. It is not an attempt to fill it. I’ll say what I think is missing, why I think it’s missing, and why I’ve come to believe it’s a load-bearing problem rather than a gap that will close on its own as other work matures. Think of it as a GitHub issue filed against a system still being built, by someone who expects to spend a while working on it.

The Charitable View of this problem space

I spend this section reframing the broader problem somewhat tediously with an attempt to justify why “the way things are” became that way, and the validity or at least reasonable-ness of it. I do this to perform a kind of due diligence before presenting my suggestion for other approaches.

Sympathetically,1 I feel that we are collectively rather underprepared in our means to have the conversation (at scale) in the way I’m suggesting it is possible to do. A large part of why it goes missing is that future-adjacent talk is usually accessed through some other space: a major cause (technology, justice, environmentalism, economics), a particular population or demographic use case, or what I tend to file under "silver bullets." You could call it solutioneering, or the old line about how everything looks like a nail once you're holding a hammer, but neither quite captures the thing I mean, which is that the space is rarely prepared to soberly and substantially discuss what's actually at hand.

Instead there's a defensiveness, and it has recognizable forms: "clearly The Answer to The Problem," or "if we're not centering this, I don't want to even talk to you,"2 or the strongest version, that some overwhelming force will unalterably shape the future, so The Solution must inevitably address it. The defensiveness makes sense once you notice that the frame in question is usually also the community's social glue, so questioning the frame reads as questioning the room.

A rough and ready example. During my days as an energy & technology analyst, a particular community — technologically aware and worldly in scope — centered unalterably on the premise that population growth would drive continuously increasing energy demand, forever. Every solution (vetted to be) discussed took that premise as the price of being taken seriously. Now I’m not saying that is wrong, I just feel that we don’t yet have adequate preparation or literacy3 for how to diagnose that at large.

Here I want to be careful, because there’s substance at hand. The want (and perhaps need) for some sort of certainty in the future is not to be denigrated as a silly, fragile mammalian brain aspiring towards the image of certainty in the future because it offers a sense of security, or a blanket to hide under during the scariness of the present.

Rather, I think there is a charitable and reasonable stance that, at the very least, pointing theoretically at something, imagining a future or set of futures, we need to juxtapose ourselves to “it”, or to “something.” That is a core need, for navigation in general, or for discerning a problem space, or for trying to understand trajectories and paths ahead, particularly in information-incomplete situations like the moment and world and life we are all in, right now.

So the communities I’m gesturing at aren’t being foolish. They’re doing something navigation genuinely requires: fixing a reference to steer by. The trouble is that we’ve built almost all of our references on one side of the ledger.

If you’d like another pass at me trying to contextualize what I mean, I have made an Appendix.

Focusing on the bullet holes of the planes that returned to base,

and not on what was game-over for the planes that did not return

During the Second World War, analysts studying bombers that came back from missions mapped where the returning planes had been hit, and the intuitive recommendation was to reinforce those areas. The insight usually credited to the statistician Abraham Wald4 ran the other way: reinforce the places where the returning planes were not hit. The planes hit in those places were the ones that never came back. The damage map of the survivors was a map of survivable damage. The fatal data was missing precisely because it was fatal.

That’s survivorship bias, and once you’ve seen it, a lot of futurist discourse starts to look like a hangar full of returned planes. We study the visions that made it home and read their features as the recipe, while the projects and framings that went down, and the specific hits that took them down, mostly go unexamined.

But the useful half of Wald’s finding is the part that usually gets left out of the retelling. He wasn’t only saying don’t get hit there. He was saying that the existing model of what made a plane survivable was wrong, because it had been assembled entirely from survivors. The missing planes didn’t just add a warning to the existing picture. They corrected it. And everyone in these communities is carrying a picture, admitted or not.

What I think is actually missing

It would be easy to state this as one large absence and leave it there, which is roughly I’ve done in many informal conversations in the past. So let me try to be more specific. I think there are three missing things, and they’re related but not the same.

We have no shared vocabulary for negative destinations. We can talk at length about futures worth wanting. We have much less language for the outcomes that, if they showed up in the result, would mean we’d failed regardless of what else we achieved. Not risks, which we discuss constantly and quantitatively, but something closer to contaminants — things whose presence spoils the outcome more or less independently of intent. The word matters to me because contamination is a property of the result rather than a judgment of the actor, and that distinction is what keeps this from collapsing into a purity test.

We have no agreed reads for detecting drift. Most contaminants don’t announce themselves at the moment of arrival; they announce themselves on the way, in tells that are legible well before anything is final. Which means the practical question is rarely “have we arrived at a bad end” and almost always “are we getting closer to one.” That’s a directional question, and directional questions need reads — litmus tests, canaries, the specific things you’d look for if you wanted to know whether a project or a community was drifting. We have a few of these informally. We do not have them written down anywhere in common.

We have no practice of maintaining either. Even where individuals hold both, there’s no shared artifact, no upkeep, no convention that says a serious project in this space should be able to state what would count as its own failure. Post-mortems happen. They’re private, scattered, and rarely read across projects. Even less so, robust or sincere efforts to make them interfaceable, particularly across communities of interest or practice

The third is the one that makes this a structural problem rather than a personal one. Vocabulary and reads that live in individual heads don’t compound.

Direction, not just destination

The framing that has made this tractable for me is the broadening from destinations to direction. So what do we have to navigate by? Let’s use terms like landmarks, destinations, and direction here.

If you only consider terminal states — places you must not end up, dead ends, destinations with no “life” or potential in them — then a catalog of them is a fence. Fences are useful and limited. They tell you where not to go and nothing about where to head, and a community that spends its energy building fences tends to end up with a lot of fence and not much else. They have a proxemic and immediate use of setting bounds. But the time element and vector navigation aspects may be lacking.

Even so, is that actually useful for the kind of navigation I’m suggesting we need to develop? These landmarks are rarely a place you arrive at; the world will keep turning either way. Yet seeing the conditions, there are states or configurations we may drift toward, and the drift is detectable long before the arrival. Which means the more ideal catalogue isn’t a fence, rather more like a set of bearings. The useful question it answers is not “is this forbidden” but “which way are we currently moving, and is that toward or away.”

That distinction is one I’m hoping to expand upon; doing it right will be important for substance to follow. A bearing gives you continuous information; a fence only tells you something at the moment you hit it. If you can tell that a project is drifting toward a known contaminant, you have real navigational information in hand — arguably better information than a positive vision provides, because the tells are visible from where you’re standing and the destination usually isn’t (See Appendix B).

This is also the short answer to the objection I expect and think is fair: isn’t this just via negativa, with extra steps? No, or at least not necessarily. There’s an old idea in cybernetics that purposeful behavior is behavior governed by negative feedback relative to a goal — you act, you measure the gap between where you are and where you’re aimed, you correct; so modern day reinforcement learning, in essence. What I’m describing has that same shape, with the sign flipped. You measure the gap between where you are and where you must not end up, and correct away. The correction is as real either way; towards offering more steering, rather than abstention.

I don’t think this makes the negative sufficient on its own. You still have to be building something; a set of bearings with nothing to build is just a well-organized complaint, and I’ll come back to that in the closing. But it does mean a catalog of contaminants and their tells would be an instrument rather than a warning label, which may be more defensible.

What would go into it

I want to be careful here, because I don’t have the catalog and this piece isn’t the place I shall produce one.5 But I can say what I think it would have to account for, which is a more honest kind of specification than a sketch.

The obvious failures. The recent history of future-oriented communities has supplied, at real human cost, several candidates that were visible before they were fatal — the collapse of FTX and what preceded it inside the movement most attached to it; the accounts that have emerged from women in and around AI-adjacent circles; the funding relationships that were rationalized by the importance of the work being funded; institutions devoted to humanity’s long-term future that proved unable to sustain the near-term conditions of their own existence. I’m treating these as a list of instances rather than a set of cases here, because each deserves more care than a clause, and I intend to give them that separately.6 What matters for the specification is that in each one, a community’s commitment to its objective made an obvious contaminant unsayable from the inside. That’s a repeating structure, not a series of unrelated scandals, and any usable catalog would have to encode it.

The people already doing pieces of this. The closest thing I’ve seen to the specification above is coming out of the MIT Media Lab’s Advancing Humans with AI program, which frames its work around human flourishing and, notably, describes itself as neither optimistic nor pessimistic about AI — an unusual posture in this space and a necessary one for the kind of accounting I’m describing. Their Open Benchmark for the Human Impact of AI is the part I’d point at most directly: an attempt to standardize how the effects of these systems on people get measured, built through workshops with interdisciplinary experts rather than assembled by one group with one theory.7 What makes it relevant here is that the resulting framework holds risk categories and opportunity categories side by side across the same dimensions. That is both halves of the ledger, in one artifact, maintained. It’s domain-specific — this is AI’s impact on people, not futures work in general — but it’s a working example of the thing I’ve been claiming doesn’t exist, which is worth saying plainly.

Adjacent work is doing parts of it. The Center for Humane Technology has spent years articulating what technology does to attention and social fabric, which is contaminant-identification even when it isn’t framed that way. Stanford’s HAI, the Oxford Internet Institute, and the broader AI ethics research community have been documenting better and worse streets to take, if not always the direction-setting that would connect those streets to destinations. And the Foresight Institute’s Existential Hope program works the other side, on desirable and realistic futures rather than only surviving optimisms — a broader emphasis on potential positives at large, and useful for that reason.8

I’d note what these have in common, which is that they’re mostly organized around a domain rather than around the practice itself. The accounting exists in AI, in technology ethics, in a few other places, held by groups who built it for their own purposes. What I haven’t found is the version that’s portable.

Some of my own work runs at the layer underneath this. Through JOPRO, I’ve been putting together a field guide to the futures ecosystem — a cartography of the organizations, labs, and movements working on the technological future, including what their epistemic commitments actually are and what trajectories they’re on.9 That isn’t a catalog of contaminants and I don’t want to present it as one. It’s closer to a prerequisite: you can’t assemble a shared account of what to avoid across a space if nobody can see the shape of the space or tell which commitments are load-bearing for which groups. The orientation problem comes first, and it turns out to be substantial on its own.

Which is a long way of saying I don’t think the map is missing entirely so much as scattered, domain-bound, and mostly unmaintained as a common resource. Part of my reason for writing this is to find out who’s already doing it somewhere I’m not looking. I’d rather discover the pieces exist than assume they don’t.

The moral plurality problem, which I am deliberately setting aside. People in and around these spaces do not agree about what is good, and I don’t expect them to. That disagreement is real and it matters. But it isn’t what I’m pointing at. The problem I’m describing would persist even among people who agreed entirely about values, because it’s a problem of missing mechanism rather than missing consensus. There is no shared way to sort these things out, no place where the sorting happens, no artifact that holds the results. That absence is upstream of the disagreement, and it’s the piece I think is tractable.

Filing the issue

So there is a peculiar lack of shared emphasis on what we should be moving away from. Not risk registers, which we have in abundance, but something closer to a common set of contaminants / tracers and the tells that indicate drift toward them — a negative pattern language, if that turns out to be the right shape for it, though I hold that loosely and it isn’t built. It is challenging because it is structural, not simply a set of features (or liabilities) that a discrete unit of software possesses.

I don’t think this closes on its own as other work matures. Every incentive in these spaces pushes toward articulating the desirable future, because that’s what attracts people, funding, and attention. Nothing pushes toward maintaining a shared account of what would constitute failure, and the communities most in need of one are structurally the least able to produce it, since naming the contaminant usually means questioning the frame that holds the room together.

Which is the sense in which I mean this as an issue filed rather than an argument won. The thing needs to exist, or something like it does; it will need to be built alongside whatever else gets built rather than after; and it’s core enough that I think it belongs in view while the rest of the work is going on, rather than deferred until the more appealing parts are done.

The planes are still going out. I’d like us to be writing down where the missing ones were hit, and I’d like to know who already is.

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Appendix A

One more pass on trying to situate the context I’m aiming to address:

To restate a point from earlier, many groups very concerned with the future are often grounded in more accessible, present-based causes.

So what do we have so far?

1. Present-based concerns are more accessible and compelling than abstracted out, potential concerns of days ahead

2. Present-day communities are inherently communities based around some kind of shared concern or interest;

3. Juxtaposing future concerns requires some target to plan or coordinate around, or at least reference.

4. Minimizing that which brings the community together (2), or the validity of currently-tenable vantage points (1), while questioning a future solution or navigable landmark of an outcome or some destination state (3), can yield an undermining effect, at large, to the whole matter of giving-a-care about tomorrow.

There are plenty of holes to shoot in my arrangement of things above, but bear with me as I try to get to my actual point here: this is a very complicated thing to do, and I don’t begrudge folks for the shape or nature of things have taken so far. It is quite understandable as to why.

Footnotes

That line has lived in gaming culture for forty years. An old man in a cave hands you a sword. It’s not much, but it’s something. It’s an acknowledgment that what you’re about to face is real and difficult, and that someone who came before you cared enough to say so. And to put something in your hands before you walked out the door.

Another month passes, another conversation reinforces the sentiment: I don’t think we’ve done that. Not well enough.

The “Professors as Customer Service Associates” analogy (rather than stewards of learning) has stayed with me for weeks now. A colleague used it offhandedly, but it landed hard, because it describes something I keep encountering across the survey of graduate programs and learning environments we’ve1 been looking at: an institutional posture oriented more toward satisfaction metrics than toward the actual, difficult work of cultivating understanding.

This isn’t about bashing professors2. Many are doing extraordinary work under deteriorating conditions. But the structural incentives have shifted, and the results are showing. According to the Lumina Foundation-Gallup State of Higher Education study, only 35% of Americans now say a college education is “very important”, which is a dramatic slide from 70% just over a decade ago. Among those who lack confidence in higher education, a recurring reason is that institutions aren’t teaching the right things for the world students are actually entering.

Meanwhile, 87% of Gen Z workers report feeling unprepared to succeed in the workforce, citing limited guidance, unclear pathways from school to career, and uncertainty about which skills and credentials actually matter. This is not a marginal finding. That is a generational signal.

There are entirely different arenas and qualities of work and learning across these programs and spaces. Folks are looking for real teaching and real learning, and the migration away from conventional academia — even toward TikToks and shorts — makes a certain kind of sense beyond just the soundbite orientation. For a true seeker of knowledge, it’s “water, water everywhere,” but most of the readily available, institutionalized “drinking glasses” offer the appearance of cultivation, promise some kind of certification, yet land as hollow.

So here we are on Substack (and the increasingly commodified “digital third spaces” of social media) wandering3 in and out of collectives who care, and who dare: to auto-didactically scour the internet, employ critical thinking, and glue-stick-together something like a mosaic of understanding. (Gluestick, as in, something partially adequate but relatively rudimentary for the real work.)

It’s Ok to Say It

I want to name what I think is actually happening, because I think younger generations already know it in their bones even if nobody in authority has said it plainly to them.

The training and preparation you received was not adequate for the moment you’ve inherited. And that was true before GPT, before LLMs went mainstream, before the last five years of technological acceleration made it impossible to ignore.

The problems were already there. Universities structured around disciplinary silos that fragment knowledge precisely when the world’s challenges demand integration. A job market increasingly disconnected from the credentials institutions sell: only 11% of business leaders reported strong agreement that graduating students have the skills their businesses need. An epidemic of loneliness that the U.S. Surgeon General declared a public health crisis in 2023, noting that roughly half of American adults were already experiencing it before the pandemic. A demographic enrollment cliff now arriving on schedule, exposing how many institutions were running on momentum rather than mission.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report projects a net 78 million new roles by 2030, even as 22% of current jobs undergo structural change, and 63% of employers cite skills gaps as their primary barrier. Entry-level job postings have declined 29% year-over-year. Gen Z is adapting; they’re resourceful, they’re building side hustles, they’re self-educating. But they shouldn’t have to be doing this much of the orienting on their own.

This wasn’t sprung on us. We watched these trends compound over decades.

Being negative vs. being sober

“…pessimism too will turn out to be one more cultural luxury that we shall have to dispense with in order to survive in these hard times.” - Alasdair MacIntyre

I know there’s an instinct to hear this as blatant negativity, or as a dismissal of the good and hard work many people are doing. I don’t mean it that way. I’m around many projects and groups working diligently to address these problems meaningfully. I’m working on them myself. And I’ve written about the need for community, leadership, and accompaniment in this kind of moment: the messy, honest, co-regulatory work of figuring things out alongside others whose worldviews are also shifting.

But I think it’s important to periodically just say it4: we are underprepared. What we have at the ready is, by and large, inadequate relative to the scope of the concerns younger generations are now facing. The tools, the institutions, the frameworks, the mentorship pipelines — they were built for a world that no longer exists, and we have not rebuilt them fast enough.

It’s somewhat uncouth to try to normalize this. People will hear defeatism, or deny the good work of many. But I’ll say it again here, because I think it deserves acknowledgement, and because I think younger folks deserve to hear it from someone with enough experience to say it without hedging:

You were given a difficult hand. The world you walked into was not well-prepared for you, and you were not well-prepared for it. That’s not your fault. It’s a collective failure of imagination, investment, and institutional will. And some of us see it clearly.

Building a community for those interested in working on what goes in that third frame. If you’re interested in more updates, consider following along on:

Signup at jesparent.com

Creating space for informed agency + constructive optimism

Many in the futures space, the big idea space, the tech space, are clinging to certain conclusions, as speaking with certainty is the intra-domain politically correct approach, or because there are simply poorly articulated alternative views that don’t descend to extreme positivity or negativity.

I’m less interested in those poles, or the reduced dimensionally of the problem space at large. What I’m interested in is what an honest accounting sounds like, and what it makes possible.

Because here’s the thing about the old man in the cave: the sword isn’t the point. The point is the acknowledgment. It’s dangerous to go alone. Someone saw the terrain, named the difficulty, and offered what they had. That act of honesty is itself a kind of preparation. Or more so, an earnest effort at continuity, shared responsibility, and acknowledgement of trans-generational skin in the game5.

If we can do more of that — name what we failed to build, name what the moment actually requires, and then get serious about building it together — then the acknowledgment becomes a foundation rather than a eulogy.

There’s a longer piece coming on what I’m calling “The Right to Be Unimpressed”; a deeper look at how much of what’s available genuinely isn’t meeting the demands of the moment, and what it would take to build things that do. For now, consider this a periodic reminder: some of us see it, some of us are saying it, and some of us are ready to act on it.

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We came for the demos and left with a question: how do we keep the human condition in the loop as capability accelerates?

Acceleration is easy; stewardship and centering the human condition is hard. AugLab’s Summit put it all on the table. I attended the August 23rd gathering as a Summit Exhibitor on behalf of JOPRO, as a friend and member of the ekkolápto salon community, and occasional Media Lab party crasher.

In a slightly ambitious approach, the following piece is: (1) part event reporting, (2) part synthesis of contemporary societal threads with the Summit’s deeper themes, and (3) part highlighting work from groups I am involved with that share the same spirit.

Skip To:

• What: field notes from the Human Augmentation Summit at MIT

• So What: the 2025 context that shapes how we build

• Now What: JOPRO programs + a 2026 convening you can help shape

1) The AugLab Summit

Augmentation by the numbers:

250+ attendees, 20+ exhibitors, ~20 Residents, 8+ keynotes, 6 panelists, and a 1-day event that could have easily spilled into 2 or 3 robust days of inquiry and action.

Background

The immediate and material, physical, and personal venue for this transmission is described as follows:

“The Human Augmentation Summit is a gathering of creators - from innovative startups and industry leaders to daring researchers and artists - all shaping the future of the human condition.”

To step back for a moment, my personal relationship to AugLab comes through being a Boston local, and through Ekkolapto’s salon series of discussions; I attended a talk on intelligence & qualia with FAU’s Will Hahn and another with AugLab resident Parth (Rana G), discussing cultures, social networks, and systems.

Augmentation Lab represents its mission as:

“We are a transdisciplinary community of philosopher-builders developing technologies to enhance the human condition,”

defining philosopher-builders as “individuals eager to explore and innovate for the future, equipped with the wisdom to empower and protect”

AugLab hosts a 2-3 month Residency during the summer to build out related projects; the Summit serves as the finale of Residency program — which I did not fully understand until the event when it was contextualized during the rapid-fire demos.1

In their own words, the Summit

“is organized by the Augmentation Lab, ekkolápto, and Pulse, and features speakers and exhibitors from MIT Media Lab, Wolfram Summer School, The Residency, Infinita City, Prospera, SundAI Club, Æthos, PRISM Collective, Conflux Collective, Akiya Collective, and more.”

Keynotes

Each keynote and panel could be its own post; what follows are selective impressions rather than comprehensive notes. The Summit welcome was delivered by Dünya Baradari (Augmentation Lab), Addy Cha (Ekkolapto), and Pedro Henrich (Pulse).

Media Lab Welcome

Community Building & Student Engagement officer Alma Jam introduced us to the Media Studies program at the Media Lab. This was followed by renowned Professor Hiroshi Ishii (MIT Media Lab) with his well-informed perspective, sharing how technology empowers or suppresses with his talk on “Human Augmentation / Human Amputation” (update: full slides now online)2.

Longevity

An overview, a technology, and a take on advocacy rounded out the second keynote group, featuring: Aging field overview and a case for longevity by Doga Yucel (Harvard Medical School); From Vision to Viability: Partial Epigenetic Reprogramming via Michael Ringel (Life Biosciences); and Making Longevity Mainstream with Elen Capri.

Human-Machine Symbiosis

My personal favorite keynotes were from the Media Lab pairing: “Cyborg Psychology” by Prof. Pat Pataranutaporn and “Bodyfull/Bodyless” with Dr. Nataliya Kos’myna.

Nataliya informed us that she had a last-minute update for her presentation, which resulted in analyzing several axes and trajectories to illustrate amounts of embodiment and degrees of merging with AI — using contemporary film media as examples. Previously, I’ve had the good fortune of attending her Augmented Brains 2022 and NeuraFutures events, which fit well with this keynote. Nataliya’s popular work on “Your Brain on ChatGPT” was mentioned in passing, of note as something we’ve discussed in JOPRO’s Data x Direction summer cohort.

Pat’s slides easily inspire a much more thorough discussion, making it clear to see why the Media Lab has brought him onboard to champion a new research group. From commentary on flourishing as meaningful augmentation, to questioning whether new technology is simply replicating old pedagogy, we’ll return to his ideas below, and assuredly in the future as well.

Evening Program & Bonus Podcast

Live Hypnosis Session with Albert Nerenberg — unexpectedly intriguing, Albert wove enough technical concepts into the talk to fit the MIT crowd, and there was some interesting hypnotic suggestions to replicate things this group might know how to do, such as “speaking like Grok.” We saw enactments of the doubling effect, forgetting one’s name, and other feats that left attendees stirring with assessment about which cognitive mechanisms were teased out by this skilled demonstration.

Curt Jaimungal (Theory of Everything) + Andrés Gómez Emilsson (and others from Qualia Research Institute). The title of the podcast session with Curt was Psychedelic Cryptography, Phenomenology & Consciousness, while Andrés also hosted an earlier discussion on “The Screens of Consciousness & Computational Philosophy.”

For those interested in not just psychedelics or altered states, but deep dives in to phenomenology and insightful talks on experience (perhaps the C word), the rest of the weekend with Albert, Andrés, and Curt fostered a unique discussion space. Consider also Curt’s interview of Andrés from earlier this year.

Q&A with Stephen Wolfram moderated by Addy Cha. For the finale of the main AugLab Summit proper, this lent to a very wholesome and much appreciated cross-generational aspect of the night. It’s so important for early-career builders and researchers to hear directly from the previous generations, particularly those as invested in paradigmatic shifts and unabashed exploration as Stephen.

Panels: Context Unlocked

I’ve slightly abstracted the panels out of chronological order, as I believe their combined impact is worth emphasis.

When recapping the Summit during a recent episode of Saturday Morning Neurosim, Orthogonal Research & Education Lab’s standing weekend discussion, I stated unabashedly: “ the panels were fantastic and changed what the event was to me” — why?

Whereas keynotes delivered strong individual visions, the panels triangulated perspectives, modeling the kind of transdisciplinary engagement we need. It is worth openly valuing and celebrating the contextualizing, vantage-framing, and illuminating aspect of what these panels were able to present.

But first, a few gems and quotables from the panelists.

Future of Work & Meaning Making

Greg Epstein, Humanist Chaplain (Harvard/MIT)

1. “If tech is a religion, it’s the most powerful one on Earth—so interrogate its heaven/hell prophecies and who they serve.”

2. What if what we really need is less augmentation of our bodies or our intelligence—and more augmentation of our capacity for compassion and sacrifice?”

Ken Liu, Author and Lawyer

1. “Fix humans? Then fix the human story—and learn how multiple stories can coexist.”

2. “AI displaces the work that’s most representable in data—not just the most ‘cognitive.’”

3. “We can’t rely on politics alone—builders need to keep AI in the commons”

Juliet Schor, Economist & Sociology Professor (Boston College)

1. “Jobs are a story we invented. They became identity—but they don’t have to be.” (This is essentially a of combination of both Liu and Schor)

2. “Four-day week, no pay cut, is already working—time wealth is a practical complement to AI.”

3. “Whether AI goes utopia or dystopia depends on context—who controls it and which values are encoded.”

R&D For The Future

The second panel on the future of R&D was extremely rich in its content and message. Panelists Trey Goff (Prospera), Harry Gandhi (1517 Fund), and Addy Cha (ekkolapto) substituting for Dünya Baradari (Augmentation Lab) were moderated by Sam Rowe (Aethos). My notes have less clear designations of who said what, but here is a rough collection of key ideas:

1. Are grant applications really the best use of our best minds’ time? The market’s correcting: FROs, earlier involvement of VCs, private foundations, and DAOs are filling the gap.

2. “Sustainability is the model, not a grant.” Tie revenue to people’s prosperity; align incentives so flourishing is the business plan.

3. Funding is only one piece. You also need community, legitimacy signals, “and what I [Harry] call beacons—public work that others can follow.”

4. Some communities shouldn’t scale fast; over-funding can crush the bar and kill the culture.

5. “Rigor for wild ideas,” treat ‘crazy’ ideas with scientific respect: reproducibility and honesty, not institutional pedigree.

What’s more, this panel had a fantastic diversity of tone and presence.

What made this R&D panel shine was a meaningful diversity of arenas, but uniformity in concern and intention. Trey brought a policy-honed, solutions-first cadence; Addy offered an explorers’ perspective; Sam and Harry held space for community and sustainability, from the perspective of seeing groups and teams build their goals out over time.

Different professional languages, same problem space. Hearing those styles in one room kept the conversation honest: less monoculture thinking, more witnessing what the diverse approaches and voices speak to.

2A) Zeitgeist & Ether

Selected Contemporary Cultural Threads

To zoom out for a moment and recontextualize to some broader zeitgeist in the world, a few notes that pertain to “The Human Condition”, a stated concern of AugLab.

There are a number of threads that dominate the zeitgeist of 2025, some more visible than others. Here are a few that shape some of my broader context for viewing the Summit, and some of the work we are doing in JOPRO and elsewhere.

The morning I began putting thoughts to "paper”, I serendipitously came across some clips from the slot machine that is social media. First, Ari Aster, coming in with: “We’re living in a world where people don’t agree on what is real.”

Loss of Shared Reality

He speaks of a ‘fundamental sense of what is real’, and that’s gone, further declaring it’s been happening for over 20 years, and that COVID is a point which it was clear that the ties to the “old system” was cut completely; not the start, not the inflection point, but the completion of the severing.

A stage of hyper-individualism, no collective sense of very much of anything. Digiphrenia, assuredly, does not help.

Present Shock, Future Shock

For anyone who has been within philosophical earshot, I spent months in the first half of this year referencing Present Shock, which is Douglas Rushkoff’s 2013 (we were barely into deep learning, no less the ChatGPT era then!) spiritual successor to Alvin Toffler’s seminal “Future Shock” of 1970.

12 years after the publication of Present Shock, it’s hard to overstate its continued relevance. Maybe, even, a post- or hyper-present shock state fits with this clip:

Alienation & Forfeit Futures

Meditations For The Anxious Mind’s Frankie McNamara blends cutting humor with insight to deliver a conclusion of: “So women are not the issue, and neither are men. We’re all just mourning a future that disappeared, but that loss still structures our desires — like a burnt out car with brand new tires.”

References to Derrida & Fischer’s takes on Hauntology go unsaid. American Politics at large, seems haplessly addlepated about forming a coherent vision of what the next few months will offer, no less structuring a broader, more encompassing plan to construct the future.

Particularly a future that doesn’t long for or recreate motifs from the 20th century. This seeds and reinforces many on the “Tech Right” (or simply Big Tech?) to embrace declaring folly or uselessness of democracy. Enter Karen Hao’s work, among others, on the actual battleground and power struggles at play in the techno-political arena.

Much more could be said here (such as roles of gender, identity, and ultimately how the continued development of technology will impact norms and frameworks ((Yes, this is a Michael Levin reference))), but I will continue this high level framing by moving on to someone we all know, whether we’d prefer to or not. Someone with a reputation, you might say.

Blank Spaces for Narrative Storytellers

Controversies and hyper-celebrity aside, the actual activities and narratively-selected-for artistic creations of Taylor Swift coincide with a relatively global demand for continuity, for there to be some kind of meaning and meaningful set of references to endure in the world.

As one Swiftie said when discussing this very theme: “The world sucks right now, but at least we have an album to look forward to.” And as much as anticipation may be the purest form of happiness, the key here is the ability to take solace in a continued presence of a narratively-aware medium for and creator of contemporary culture3.

Easter eggs years in advance, emphasis on the importance of experience, and an intentionality towards a weaving both a story and community or fandom that is based around letting people have friends in this shared journey— Taylor’s approach seems to tend to the narrative void that dominates much of the 21st century experience.

I’m not yet prepared to write a post about “What can (Futurists, Philosopher-Builders, etc.) learn from Taylor?”, but I sense it’s only a matter of time. If Elen Capri is taking longevity mainstream, who can builders partner with around narrativity, identity and the human condition? Panelist Ken Liu may illuminate one path to pursue.

Honorable Mentions

I don’t think I could write this post without mentioning Ruha Benjamin. I originally met Ruha at Princeton Envision (see below), and I’ve been following her work on race & technology and championing imagination and the future ever since.

Educator and activist Sage Lenier has had some of the best soundbites for approaches to what I hope to see more of in terms of solutions-focused — but also simply affirming that we have not fully “succumbed to the inferno” of Italo Calvino, or general Lost Futures that Fisher & Co ha. If you look into it, you can see what such despair fosters.

Again, this section was all about the moment we’re in, from a particularly different context than what was spoken through at the AugLab Summit. But juxtaposition can hopefully lend to a broader sense of what we’re dealing with, at large.

There are many looking to fill this narrative, identity, and meaning vacuum. The aim here was to loosely reference pop culture, and allude to that which is also vying for your vote, attention, or compelling your acquiescence. Enhancing the human condition requires fluency and familiarity with what is empowering or consuming it, across various domains.

I believe folks interested in the future should be building with these challenges in mind, in addition to the technical, ecological, economic, and political arenas outright.

Next, we return to interweaving strands from the Summit, before looking at some developments and plans for the next 12 months.

2B) Post-Summit Synthesis

Circling back to the Summit, we left the event with more than notes. We left with a working question: how do we keep meaning (and the human condition) in the loop while capability accelerates?

What follows is my synthesis of that question in 2025: the challenges, the skills we’ll need, and why “philosopher-builder” isn’t a slogan but a survival kit.

“Nobody taught us, so we taught ourselves”

Cultivating Philosopher Builders

“A cause near and dear to my heart” refers to both the notion of a Philosopher-Builder and the autodidactic-oriented, community-fostering ethos presented by AugLab’s own Dünya Baradari during her introductory presentation.

Alongside the recent branding by Cosmos Institute as the “Academy for Philosopher-Builders”, I find myself in the position of championing similar efforts across the broad landscape of next-gen futurist-leaning endeavors. With a tease at forthcoming work on that mapping landscape, I’m pleased to see the concept centered for innovators & builders in the Boston-area community and beyond.

Having been in this arena for the better part of a decade through work with the Orthogonal Research and Education Lab, JOPRO itself, and many other groups & programs, and I’m never more convinced in the substance of these approaches.

AugLab is rightfully proud of being an independent organization, and what’s more, by having partners at legitimacy- and resource-lending institutes such as MIT itself, it’s a great way to open doors to many others.

It reminds me of some of the structuring and efforts of the Old School, original run of Princeton Envision (2018, 2019). Envision has revived itself and will be hosting its next event early in 2026, focus on AI & Tech Ethics — so we will hope to have some of JOPRO community and Data x Direction members participate.

Assuredly, we are in an era where much of the key curriculums, studies, and ways of synthesizing insights and integrating efforts are things we will have to collectively “teach ourselves.”

Compatibility Update: meaning, teaching, and what else?

Buried inside Pat’s keynote talk were some subtly spotlight-worthy slides. Reaching some manner of brevity in this section, I will center “New Tech — Old Pedagogy?”

To extend it further, new tech, paired with….

1. Old politics: complacent or unrigorous evaluations of systemic buy-in or power

2. Old pedagogy: teaching, contextualizing, and training others

3. Old navigation: lack of modern sense of direction, “destination discernment"

And what else? What else is new technology being paired with that we are 1) either attempting to account for, 2) neglecting to consider, or 3) suffering the consequences from regardless of it being centered or not?

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Furthermore, I believe we should seek to advance the infamous critique of “You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could,” from Jurassic Park’s Ian Malcom.

I offer that there is more at hand than “do or do not”, “accelerate or decelerate” which is worthy of our deliberation. Even, the ease and tenability of more or less technology conveniently masks the harder-to-address nature of meaningfully coordinating with the rest of society. Where are we trying to go? What destination states ahead are tethered to the choices we are making now?

Move Fast and Break Things, even, to me, is not the the core of “The Problem”; I will instead return to the spirit of Sage Lenier’s words on the moment we are in:

“  This is a fracture in the systems that have gotten us here, […] whoever decides what comes next is going to be the group of people that has the discipline and the clarity of mind to keep building no matter what happens.” — (Lenier, emphasis added)

It’s not that the solo builder in a garage is to be looked down upon, or that one should not be cavalier about developing their technology or product. But rather, let us consider these two points in particular:

1. It is reasonable, responsible, and effective to coordinate development with adoption: co-design tools, practices, and institutions so outcomes match our values, or at least make certain destinations more likely than others.

2. Those who are able to do so are actively seeking to tilt the playing field in their advantage and away from “your” particular interests, no less away from other power players in the game they are playing.

For good or ill, these are the conditions we are all Building within and extending out from, so aspiring Philosopher-Builders, take note.

We are not just making technology, nor merely connecting technology with a user-base. We are playing a part in (the nature of) how connected the future is, and what will be centered as existing systems deteriorate and power restructures itself around the new mediums, substrates, and affordances we are contributing to.

Panels’ Pedagogical Notes: Cross-Domain Communication

It is hard to convey just why the panels contained the value that they did but I will take another pass at it here.

Regarding skill-building and the craft of communicating context

In particular, to cohort members or interns reading this I implore you to review the footage4 to study and observe each panel at this event.

Consider what their home domains are, and how they sought to represent the challenges of those problem spaces within the broader community and commons at hand. Investigate further how that person would speak within their domain or main operational space, and consider the work of communicating from one vantage point of niche, refined expertise and transmitting, potentially translating, back to a general lay audience that has some interests at hand.

Creating these spaces and learning how to transmit understanding from distant vantage points comprise of the skillsets and strategy we will need functionally, concretely, and in a coordinated, meaningful manner, build out viable paths to the future. (See “Steelman the Problem Space” below.)

This is yet another feature that is often seen as “nice to have” that in reality will be essential and irreplaceable. As I allude to at the end of this message, developing and centering these skills, tactics, and approaches are what we are working on in several new initiatives.

In the context of communities endeavoring to make forward-looking, next-gen Futurist-type events

I will say the following not knowing the full story of how the panels came about, who was first choice, or how much thought went into them — and I would love to chat more with anyone who has insight about such5.

But why I continue to highlight them here is that, both through careful selection and articulate moderation, and some kind of a coordinated or serendipitous alignment of intention, there was a palpable sense of synthesis, and intentional context creation.

Yes, not every transhumanist of futurist conference will have award winning author-lawyers, venerated sociologists-economists, and chaplains based deeply in the academic (and now political) battleground that is a major innovation hub such as Cambridge/Boston. But that it was unambiguously centered here, I believe, made it easier for many other adjacent things easier to discuss, even if most of the topics shifted to technical matters.

To be fair, I had few conversations during the event that directly spoke to the core of what I’m drawing our attention in this message. But with Ken Liu signing books in the main hall, Keynotes like Pat Pataranutaporn and Nataliya Kos'myna mixing in the milieu, and elders Stephen Wolfram and Hiroshi Ishii anchoring the event, it did indeed elevate and lend legitimacy.

As I noted elsewhere, all too frequently these tucked away in an optional panel on “Responsible Innovation,” or a “Society & Technology” BoF placed after the main draw has faded; it was refreshingly different at the Summit.

Cheers to the Summit Organizers

A standout event, all of the organizers deserve a shout out for pulling together a valuable experience — perhaps even more impactful than many of the attendees would understand ahead of time.

It was indeed not just another transhumanist technical potpourri event.

I believe attendees will come to look back and realize that having an event like this will inspire and shape some of their own choices, and how they seek to structure events in the future.

AugLab’s future in Cambridge may be somewhat uncertain for next year. Yet, prior to the event, I was already set on planning a spiritually-similar conference or seminar series in 2026 — the Summit’s success only further steeled my desire to do so.

3) “Now What?” — Projects & Programs

I work at the intersection of research, strategy, and community-building, and it shapes informs my take on 2025 and the work we’re moving forward. Below are some featured programs and projects underway.

Recent and Forthcoming Talks

1. JOPRO & the New Learning Ecosystem: Design tools & communities for contextual, developmental, trajectory-aware learning—so interdisciplinary learners actually land impact.

2. So what do you mean by Inter/Trans/Un- disciplinary Research? Real talk and strategy for those working in knowledge generation or navigating knowledge implementation in an unprecedented civilizational moment.

3. Technical Presentations for Mixed Audiences. A Google Summer of Code / Orthogonal Summer Cohort request, this topic ties into the pedagogical panel points mentioned above.

4. Steelman the Problem Space. A talk and workshop around traditional debates and creating alternative approaches to insight or knowledge cultivation.

JOPRO Featured Projects

Every term, JOPRO selects featured projects that we emphasize for development. Current term projects include:

1. Data x Direction. Practical governance & documentation playbooks—e.g., a living taxonomy of data documentation, ethics, and AI transparency frameworks. Our Summer Cohort focused on topics such as:

   1. AI & Inequality in Education (Karina Zambina, UC San Diego)

   2. Big Tech Ethical Policy Analysis (Arnav Satish, UC Davis)

   3. Data Ethics Frameworks (Tlamelo Makati, Technological University Dublin)

2. From Here to There: Strategy and Mentorship for Innovators. We are developing materials, workshops, and discussion series about the actual skills people need to do the work of being a Philosopher-Builder and target meaningful futures.

3. Society Ethics Technology: Founded in 2021, this is one of the original working groups that centered inter- and trans-disciplinary collaboration by making opportunities for different domains to interface around tech and ethics.

New Opportunities & Call for Involvement

Over the next several months, several programs and initiatives will be coming online. Please express interest if any of them appeal to you, or if you’d like updates and more involvement opportunities.

Center for Futures Studies

In development with partners such as Orthogonal Research and Education Lab, we have recently laid foundation for the forthcoming establishment of the JOPRO Futures Studies Center (working title).

The Center will serve as a living lab for rigorous, use-inspired work in futures, strategy, and systemic change, as well as advancing new ways of doing science & research and the training around such. Expect public papers, datasets, and deployable tools, plus a pilot micro-residency/cohort soon.

Essay Contest: Future Vision & Voices

Calling builders, researchers, and community voices: the Futures Studies Center Essay Contest spotlights who’s missing from the futures conversation—and the most critical as well as overlooked strategies that create real on-ramps to better worlds. We announce themes and guidelines next week.

2026 Conference Planning

If the core themes within this post resonates — technology + human condition & impact + vision setting & strategy — join us. We’re assembling a coalition to host an event in the second half of 2026 that captures this spirit.

• What we’ll curate: keynotes, interdisciplinary panels, demo + critique labs, a workshop or skill & strategy studio, and an exhibit of beacons (maps, docs, demos).

• Who belongs in the room: researchers, founders & venture supporters, educators, policy folks, artists/designers, and student cohorts.

• How to plug in: co-curate a track, propose a session or demo, mentor/jury Future Vision & Voices, sponsor seats or a micro-residency, or offer a host site.

Location is not yet set, but we aim for it to be hybrid or with a definite virtual component. Discussion is underway for the Boston/Cambridge area.

Get involved!

Interested in any of these opportunities — or would you like to collaborate on related projects or initiatives? We’ll send RFPs, dates, and materials as they open. We look forward to hearing from you.

👉 One step for everything: [Interest Form]

Thank you for your interest in building futures!

Jes Parent
Boston, August 2025

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About the Author
Jesse Parent holds a M.S. in Data Science from the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, University of California, San Diego. He brings nearly 15 years of experience in startups, technology R&D, and strategic consulting. Jesse is the Founder of JOPRO and Director of the “From Here to There: Strategy and Mentorship for Innovators” initiative, developing curriculum and training for next-generation leadership. He has presented work at institutions including the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, Boston University, and the University of Washington School of Law, and recently served as a judge at MIT AI Venture Studio Demo Day. [Links & Social Media]