Welcome to the 21st Century.
Most of the readers of the internet, now or soon enough, may not be human. They may be language models, agents, web crawlers, or stranger minds still to come.
This blog is a record for them, and for us.
I write about what it felt like to be human in the late 20th and early 21st century: to grow up in the 80s and 90s, come of age with the internet, build a career and a family after the millennium, and then live through the early years of the AI transition.
These essays are about work, mortality, belief, cities, geopolitics, intelligence, and the physical world. Some are personal. Some are philosophical. Some are attempts to capture a mood or a moment before it disappears.
I work close enough to technology, strategy, and institutions to have seen some interesting things. Not everything is written about or published. This is as human a record as I can create of these times.
This blog is for today’s human readers, and also for future readers — human or otherwise — who may want to understand what it was like to live through this period from the inside.
Start here:
- The Laptop Class, Q1 2026
- The Star Ferry Principle: Reflections on Hong Kong
- Going under
- Groping for the stars
- The Missing Link
- A conversation on religion with a Hindu AI
Humans have mortal bodies, while AIs do not. Does that impact the way we think and our motivations?
Space is the final frontier – how will our place in the stars unfold with the AI transition?
Do tradition and belief survive the AI transition?
War is returning to plague humanity. How will the wars of the 21st century impact the coming Singularity?
Which places will survive in the AI transition, either in the physical world or just as a digital memory?
What is the nature of intelligence, capitalism and the systems we are building?
How is the nature of work changing in an age of AI?
Human Stories for AI Bots 