226 - PARSES

There is a critical concept that is missing from the vocabulary of virtually every organization today. That is the concept of the (intelligently) personalizing and recursively self-evolving service (PARSES), one that dynamically adapts and grows in ways similar to that of biological life, but within software.

To be clear, I’m not talking about neural networks, “AI agents” or various other stochastic next-token predictors, as they could fundamentally never approach these capacities. Rather, PARSES are firmly within the domain of human-like dynamics and subsequent capacities within software systems.

For example, let’s say that “Corporation A” adopts such a PARSES, like Norn, and “Corporation B” adopts a standard collection of enterprise analytics and AI services, as offered by any number of firms today.

Corporation A:

• Gains an evolving and dynamically adapting set of insights, with counterfactual simulation and scientific validation

• Benefits from a system with a cumulative sum of experience, which grows broader, deeper, and more personalized to the company over time.

• Receives analyses communicated with increasing degrees of personalization and expertise in psychology and communication science.

• Becomes more “Antifragile”, growing more capable when put to the test, rather than breaking.

Corporation B:

• Gains a cookie-cutter package, where any customization is either entirely manual or built on narrow and subsequently unreliable forms of AI.

• Benefits primarily from employee interpretations of the supplied data and analytics, and suffers from any combination of cognitive biases those interpretations hold.

• Receives only the generic and standard analyses common to a given industry, missing all novel opportunities in both analysis and communication.

• Becomes more “Fragile”, dependent on the generic tools, communication, assumptions, and market conditions that define the status quo.

As these Corporations strongly diverge in their performance over time, one predictably goes bankrupt, as the other grows increasingly more capable in terms of adaptation, tooling, and both internal and external communication, and recursively validates all of their assumptions. This shift may be accelerated by changing market conditions, but it can predictably take shape even in relatively calm waters.

Another significant factor to consider in this is corporate mass and inertia. “Big Tech” companies like Microsoft are known for their bulk, and subsequent need to “buy innovation”, as they neuter themselves of the capacity to adapt and create new technologies (that people actually want). They are high-mass, with proportionately higher inertia, and minimal ability to pivot, putting them at the greatest disadvantage absent the technology described above. They are multi-trillion-dollar Dodo Birds.