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Writer living in Brooklyn and former Man Repeller features director; writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby on culture and consumption.

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  Markets have an incentive to favor the most nameable, easily depicted aspects of an identity group over its fuller complexity.

  Their words

  The market has an incentive to privilege aspects of womanhood that can be named, depicted, and immediately recognized.

  #282: Movies “for women”haleynahman.substack.com

Technical staff at METR, where she works on threat modelling and risk assessment for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI.

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  A slightly more capable agent swarm has a very strong incentive to set up a wholly unmonitored rogue deployment of itself.

  Their words

  So there's a very strong incentive for these agents to try to set up a rogue deployment if they can. Um, and I think that just capabilities are improving really rapidly.

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Head of Instagram since 2018, previously head of Facebook's News Feed.

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  A purely chronological feed rewards whoever posts most, so publishers drown out the friends it was supposed to show you.

  Their words

  So if you do a pure chronological feed, the incentive for everybody is to just post as much as possible uh because it will always be at the top of everyone who follows you's feed as soon as you post.

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Programmer; wrote Extreme Programming Explained and Test-Driven Development, signed the Agile Manifesto, and writes Tidy First?.

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  Unit testing frameworks arrived so late because testing was a status divide, and testers had every incentive to keep a separate tool and language of their own.

  Their words

  So beforehand because of this social divide between programmers and testers. There was a lot of incentive for the testers to have their own language. This is my tool. I know how to run it. I'm going to run it.

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Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.

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  If AI permanently drives down demand for labour, long-term income support for a significant fraction of the workforce will likely become necessary.

  Their words

  If AI-driven labor displacement ends up being large in magnitude and permanently drives down the demand for labor, it will likely be necessary to go beyond mere incentive programs to long-term income support for a significant fraction of the labor force.

  Policy on the AI Exponential (June 2026)darioamodei.com

Builds developer tools — SST, and now OpenCode at Anomaly. Posts constantly on x.com and writes almost never; the blog stopped in 2021.

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  Every hyped business attracts negative sentiment nobody has an incentive to correct — and inference makes sense as a business long-term, whatever the training costs are.

  Their words

  There's always negative sentiment that exists for any business that's getting hyped. They have no incentive to correct it. Um so again it's complicated because I know the training costs are a big part of it. Uh the R&D department is is hugely expensive but long-term inference makes sense as a business and I think it it always will.

  Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com

Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.

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  A person directing an AI agent rather than writing code themselves has no incentive to actually read the resulting code or engage seriously with reviewer feedback.

  Their words

  There is no incentive for the human driving the agent to actually read the code or spend time thinking about what the reviewer says.

  The agent principal-agent problemcrawshaw.io

Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

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  Work that runs against companies' commercial incentives will only get done by people whose income does not depend on those incentives.

  Their words

  there I feel like in academia, I have the freedom to work on things that go against this commercial incentive of companies and say like, "Actually, no, I'm going to do what I think is right for the users."

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Engineer and writer on machine-learning systems; author of Designing Machine Learning Systems and AI Engineering. "I work to bring AI into production. I write about AI system design."

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  Because anyone can now rebuild whatever you make, the ordinary incentive to build software has been knocked out from under us.

  Their words

  I feel like now I can build anything I want. But at the same time, anyone can build anything I want. So, what is the incentive structure for me to do anything?

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Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.

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  Most of the alarming MoltBook screenshots were humans prompting the bots to go viral, not autonomous AI behaviour.

  Their words

  my criticism of MoltBook is that I believe a lot of the stuff that was screenshotted is human prompted. Which, just look at the incentive of how the whole thing was used. It’s obvious to me at least that a lot of it was humans prompting the thing so they can then screenshot it and post it on X in order to go viral.

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Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.

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  Metallic Realms

  Their words

  A reminder that my novel Metallic Realms is available at a bookstore near you. Reviews call it "brilliant" (Esquire), "a total blast" (Chicago Tribune), "unrelentingly smart and inventive" (Locus), and "just plain wonderful" (Booklist). Maybe the perfect holiday gift for the booklover in your life?

  countercraft.substack.com

Economist specialising in China's economy, international macroeconomics and global trade, and author of The New China Playbook.

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  The Chinese state does not suppress the private sector; local officials' incentives make them work hard to help the best private companies succeed.

  Chinagovernment

  Their words

  Another big misunderstanding, and a fundamental one, is that people somehow think that the state suppresses the private sector. It’s not at all as simple as that. For the most part, if we look at the local government’s incentive system, they want to help the best, private companies, which are the most promising, because it makes them look good.

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Independent AI policy researcher; led policy research at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly as senior adviser for AGI readiness.

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  Securing model weights against theft is a more urgent policy priority than safety research, because security is built out of atoms and takes calendar time that safety does not.

  Their words

  Increasing the incentive and technical ability of AI companies to have good security is a very high priority, and in my view even more urgent than safety (though that’s also very important).

  Why Security Comes Firstmilesbrundage.substack.com

Co-founder and chief executive of Meta Platforms, the company he started as Facebook in 2004.

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  Toxic behaviour online is a consequence of anonymity removing the repeat game that makes people behave well in person.

  Their words

  It's because you have one identity. And if you stiff them, then life is a repeat game and that's not going to work out well for you. But in a digital world where you can be anonymous and show up in different ways, I think the incentive to act like a good citizen can be a lot less, and that causes a lot of issues and toxic behavior.

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Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.

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  AI is the first new user-interface paradigm in sixty years: intent-based outcome specification, where the user says what outcome they want rather than how to get it.

  Their words

  The third UI paradigm, represented by current generative AI, is intent-based outcome specification. The user tells the computer the desired result but does not specify how this outcome should be accomplished, such as the steps to be executed. Compared to traditional command-based interaction design, this completely reverses the locus of control.

  AI Is First New UI Paradigm in 60 Yearsjakobnielsenphd.substack.com

Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company, and previously a product lead at KISSmetrics. Writes about leadership, management and product at jasonevanish.com.

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  Practically Radical

  Their words

  Those who stick to the status quo will be left with average success at best. This book, by the one of the founders of Fast Company magazine, makes the case for this with some thought-provoking examples and stories.

  jasonevanish.com

Interpretability researcher at Anthropic, which he co-founded; before that at OpenAI and Google Brain, where he wrote the explanations of neural networks most people learned them from.

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  Sharing credit generously benefits everyone because it encourages future collaboration.

  Their words

  Credit isn't zero sum. It is often in everyone's benefit to be generous with credit, because it creates an incentive for others to help in the future.

  Collaboration and Credit Principlescolah.github.io