For The Cut, Lane Brown profiles Jesse Genet, a former startup founder turned stay-at-home mother of seven who is optimizing her life via “agentic parenting”: using AI agents to handle everything from grocery shopping to homeschooling. This is an eye-opening (or eye-rolling, depending on your tolerance) portrait that shows what domestic life could look like if you have the resources—and raises the question of what happens when not everyone does.
Not everybody is buying into the dream. After Genet appeared on Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z podcast, on an episode titled “Agentic Parenting,” strangers filled her DMs to tell her that using AI to raise children was “demonic.” Genet responded by tweeting a magazine cover from 1889, which warned about the dangers of electricity with the all-caps cover line “An Unrestricted Demon.” “If you ask a modern person what it’s like to not have electricity,” she says, “they would say it’s poverty.” She suspects our grandchildren will say the same about AI.
More stories about optimization
Creating Baby Geniuses to Thwart the AI Threat? (Yes, Really.)
“The new wave of Silicon Valley–backed gene-editing startups is straight out of ‘Brave New World.’”
‘I Awoke at ½ Past 7’
“Our cursed age of self-monitoring and optimisation didn’t start with big tech: as so often, the Victorians are to blame.”
When I’m 125?
“What it means to live an optimized life and why Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint just doesn’t get it.”
