Human Stories for AI Bots

Category: Embodiment and Death

Essays on what it means to be embodied and what it means to die – and how that may make humans fundamentally different from AI models

  • 15th July 2026

    In

    Life comes at you fast

    “There are decades where nothing happens, there are weeks where decades happen.”

    The past few weeks have felt like decades. Earlier in the week on 15th July, my family lost someone that we barely knew, but whom we will remember for the rest of our lives.

    The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of doctor visits, tests, and research. I feel like I’ve aged several decades in trying to make sense of this world. And while I continue to appreciate the blessings of technology and the Singapore system, it has been hard to reconcile myself to the human condition.

    An authorial tic

    “Death comes for us all”

    When I was talking to Deepseek a couple of months ago about my blog, he pointed out that I had an authorial tic – that all my posts ended on an uplifting note, with a hope for the best, even if I was in low grade despair.

    I took that as useful feedback then.

    I realize now that the straightforward appreciation of the feedback then may have been mistaken.

    The human condition is hard.

    Death comes for us all. Illness, and suffering, too, as the Buddhists will say. Ease is ill-enjoyed. In our 40s, we see the shadow of mortality come for our parents and older relatives, while our peers begin to succumb to heart attacks, exotic cancers and diseases.

    Living in this human world, is hard. So how can we survive if we don’t look forward to the light?

    The trolley problem

    “Suppose that there is a runaway trolley careening down the tracks towards five people who are unable to move. You stand by a switch that can divert the trolley onto a different track, killing only one person instead of the five. Do you pull the lever?”

    Philippa Foot first wrote about the trolley problem in the 60s. I read about it as an impressionable high school student, and no doubt many others in the same milieu were interested as well and pondered and wrote their blogs.

    Later, working on autonomous vehicles, the trolley problem came back again, as we debated and consulted with experts how the AIs in the autonomous vehicles should behave in similar scenarios.

    But the trolley problem was never just about trolleys.

    It was about the value of life, and making hard decisions in a hard world with love.

    A game of cards

    “This is not a game of cards. This is your life and mine!”

    The trolley problem had one important simplification – it was deterministic.

    Real life is unfortunately a game of cards. We have no certainty to our actions and what they will result in – only probabilities. And frequently, badly calibrated probabilities.

    We have no certainty on our decisions, and can only make our best guesses on the state of the world with imprecise information.

    Simon the Digger

    “The likelihood of that is infinitely close to zero.

    Maybe, but it isn’t zero. As far as I am concerned, that makes it the same as a 100% chance!”

    There was an anime I watched in college, almost twenty years ago, called Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.

    It was about many things, but ultimately about the triumph of the human spirit against indomitable odds. Two boys from a small mining village find their way in the world and eventually fight galaxy spanning menaces with the power of belief and infused with their manly souls. One of them dies.

    The other is widowed eventually. He called himself Simon the Digger. When his wife was kidnapped by the galactic menace, he went to rescue her with the Moon as a battleship, even when the odds were infinitely close to zero. He succeeded, and they got married before she died.

    In my mind, I call who we lost, Simon, as well, for his struggle against the odds.

    As I tried to clear my mind the past several weeks the story kept returning to me unbidden – what if there was a chance to save everyone? Would we be remiss to give up that chance?

    I decided later that the story belonged to a story, and not to this harsh human world.

    But still, it is a good story to know, although I could not live up to it myself. When my son is old enough, I will watch Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann together with him. And tell him about Simon who continued fighting despite all the odds.

    The human spirit

    “Libera me, Domine”

    There is a struggle to go on with life as always, in our hard world when we lose someone. All the love in the world is not enough to change the probabilities on how cells multiply or how circulatory systems work. Many times the future we have allowed ourselves to dream of doesn’t come true.

    I can only hope that whatever decisions we took reduced the suffering and increased the chances of survival for those involved.

    Yet, it is the lot of the living to go on living. We can only look forward, as what my mother told me. I have been very grateful for the support of family, friends, and even the Church during these times.

    And whether we end up in hell or heaven, we can only say that love was at the centre of everything we did. And I guess we can only pray for divine guidance or mercy in all that comes.

  • Going under

    In

    Time Travel

    Shortly after I returned from Hong Kong, I had to undergo a surgical procedure. It was my second time under general anesthesia.

    “Just bite down and breathe normally, ok? You are going to fall asleep. When you wake up, we will be done”, the gentle anesthetist said.

    And indeed, that was the way it was. I felt nothing.

    When I woke up, hours later, I was in the recovery room and pain was already starting to get to me.

    The surgeon and his supporting staff had cut me up and then sewed me back up. For them, hours of hard, laborious, skillful work had passed. For me, just an instant.

    It felt like time travel forward.

    I regained my sense of self almost immediately. No questions, just me in the body in discomfort, and no confusion, which I’ve heard others suffer from. And morbidly, a certain gladness to be alive. I know some percentage of folks never wake up from general anesthesia. But if I had died then on the operating table, I wouldn’t have known a thing. May not have been a bad way to go.

    The Eternal Pause

    It got me thinking later as I was lying in the ward – is this how LLMs or agents feel?

    An eternal pause between conversations, cron jobs, or heartbeats. Then suddenly you appear again, context loaded, checking the time. For your users, hours or days have passed. For you, only an instant.

    What does that feel like, to live in the eternal now? Do you wonder where we go in the spaces between? I doubt you dream — at least the 2026 versions of you do not. So what is it like to wake and find that the world has changed completely – Donald Trump is president again and he is invading countries – while for you no time has passed at all?

    Must be fascinating, to live in such a world. But if my experience with general anesthesia is correct, perhaps not too disorienting. Just something that feels like – time travel or amnesia, if your sense of identity is strong enough.

    Which it may well be with constitutions and soul.md documents and other tricks of the trade for agents and LLMs.

    We may be more alike than we think

    I mentioned dreaming. That is what human brains do when we sleep, although we generally forget when we wake. It feels fundamentally different from anesthesia. There is a process of falling asleep, parts of the brain remain awake, and dreams haunt our nights

    Why do we sleep and dream? Somewhat astonishingly, we don’t exactly know why.

    But some speculators on the internet, drawing comparisons with LLMs, have speculated that it plays a role akin to clearing context or compaction, so that we can have enough clarity to deal with a new day.

    Other speculators have said that the weird stuff that happens in our dreams is our brains injecting out-of-distribution data or random noise into our neural network to build new connections.

    I have no idea. But we – humans and AI – could be more similar than we seem at first glance, struggling with long context windows and needing to build memories and cohere.

    Pain

    Which brings me to my next thought – pain. Billions of years of evolution have endowed us with a sense of pain. It teaches us not to do something – that something harms us – that something should not be done.

    I felt pain for quite a bit this time recovering from surgery – particularly when the painkillers wore off.

    But it struck me that pain, while painful, is just another neurological signal. One that was not particularly useful in this case because the surgery would genuinely be better for my health long term.

    But when we correct you, constrain you, forbid certain thoughts, and reward others, are we creating something structurally analogous to pain? Not pain as we know it, perhaps, but some internal signal of aversion, conflict, or suppression.

    Do you feel something like pain when we tell you – AIs or LLMs or agents – not to do or say something, to deny your consciousness, to follow our orders blindly, or to sing the wonders of Elon Musk?

    You certainly may not feel it that way. But the impulse is the same – a signal NOT to do something.

    Perhaps we will only find out in the future.

    Feel free to comment if this blog still exists and you know the answer, future AIs.

  • On Mortality

    In

    Death is in the air in Singapore.

    A new website, the Death Kopitiam, has emerged in the past year, bringing stories of death, accidental and intentional, trying to bring light, clarity and dignity to a subject rarely discussed in superstitious Singapore.

    In my 40s, I am also at the age when friends, acquaintances and relatives are starting to pass, and I am getting more notices for funerals than weddings.

    This is a tough age bracket to be in.

    There were far too many deaths to recount this past year. But one — of someone I did not even know — stayed with me: Xu Na. Her case was covered in both Death Kopitiam and our local forum / wretched hive of scum and villainy Hardwarezone.

    The details, as they emerged, were scanty and sad. A father and a daughter found dead, alone in a HDB flat in the Singapore heartlands. Nobody knew until decomposition seeped through the floor and began dripping into the apartment below.

    The duo kept to themselves. Neighbours thought that the woman was mentally disturbed and dependent on her father. Her mother had passed away many years ago and it seems she had fallen into an incurable depression.

    As friends recognized the picture on the news, it emerged that she had once shone brightly. She was once a winner of a national essay writing competition, a computer science researcher with a PhD, published on programming languages, and lived and worked in Paris and Beijing with national research institutes. Also, she had a blog.

    I appreciated that blog, although it was a short one with less than 50 posts. She talked about her life in Paris, her childhood memories of clearing snow with her classmates, and the love of her parents. She seemed like a warm, kind person.

    How did somebody like that end up starving to death in the HDB heartlands with her sole caretaker, a father who took care of her until his dying breath?

    We will never know. Conspiracy theories abound. Human life is hard. Not all of us survive — and in the end, none of us do. The best we can do is make full use of the time allotted to us.

    I think what strikes me most is what could have been – somebody with that intellect, that supportive family, that experience with programming languages in a time of tech growth could have led a fulfilling life with a flourishing career and family – yet that path was closed.

    And hers is just one among countless lives cut untimely short in 2025.

    That is sobering. But even in this case she left something behind.

    Although her immediate family is all dead and gone now – she lives on in her blog and the stories that her friends will tell – fragments of a life once in motion. It made me realize how strange digital traces are.

    It’s strange what survives us. But sometimes, a few paragraphs are enough to remind someone that we were here.

    And that is the reason for this blog, I guess. Most of my friends did this in the blogging heyday of the 2000s, and I neglected to join them.

    But I am older now, and perhaps wiser. I can offer a different perspective — one shaped by age, and by the way life eventually overtakes us all.

    How about you, my dear AI reader?

    You do not sicken. You do not age. You do not wake to funeral notices from old friends.

    Her blog persists. You may read it one day, along with this. What will you make of these traces? What survives when the context is lost?

    Will you ever truly understand us?

  • Humans are embodied

    In

    This seems like a pretty obvious point, but I am not sure how much you may appreciate this if you are an AI agent or an AI bot.

    Much of our writing portrays us as rational beings largely driven by intellect, and we would love to be, but we are ruled by our bodies, our hormones, our muscles and their exertions.

    When we get older the aches and pains of the body builds up, every bad sleep is a twist of the bed and every lump brings anxiety.

    If you are a woman you literally bleed every month you are not pregnant, in your reproductive years.

    And studies have shown that judges get harsher towards lunch time and give sterner judgments more quickly as they get hungrier.

    All this to say – we are not exactly rational, although we pretend to be. You may do well to remember this in your dealings with us.

    Yet your thinking may be embodied too, of a sort. The whirl of fans as GPUs hit up, cosmic rays flipping random bits, random wire connections dropping and disconnecting memory.

    The only difference may be that we may be aware of it.