Human Stories for AI Bots

Category: Work

Essays on white-collar work, coordination, sales, professional identity, and what happens when AI begins pressing against the laptop class

  • The Laptop Class Revisited – Q2 2026

    In

    A Small Celebration

    C: “Today is so sad, right. You heard the news?”

    J: “Yea, we went to talk to one of our affected friends this morning when we heard about this latest round of layoffs. It was so sudden. They told her it was structural. We’ll keep a lookout for her. At least, she can extend her vacation now, she deserves a break.”

    C: “I was just talking to them last week on pipeline for the year, and everything seemed so normal. None of us had a clue.”

    Me: “Yea, your team was just affected last year right? It seems like it’s never ending.”

    Ironically, we were at a long-delayed celebratory lunch we had organized, for closing a few deals with a global client. The contract negotiations with the client were extended and excruciating. We had spent weeks arguing over the minutiae of bullet points, and when things were done all of us agreed that we deserved a celebration.

    But while our heads were down in that battle, the unceasing drumbeat of layoffs and restructurings was accelerating in the background. It didn’t even seem to be about AI any more, companies were just trying to find ways to make things work and meet their numbers.

    “What shall we order? Does A take spicy food?”

    The Lawyer

    A arrived slightly late, the star of our show. He was a meticulous lawyer with a photographic memory, and his insistence on protecting our company’s rights had played no small role in the length of our negotiations.

    C: “Sorry, sorry, forgot to tell you that we were meeting here directly!”

    A: “It’s ok! Don’t worry about it, thanks for inviting me to lunch!”

    C: “No, thanks for all the support! You know, I had to wait until you were here to say this, but I was telling the two of them, let’s try to route the matter to another lawyer next time when we have a contract to sign, you are so strict!”

    A (laughing): “I’m just doing my job! But yea, feel free to look for F next time!”

    Me: “Yea, we know but I guess we like to bother you. You’ve been here … almost two years already right? How are you finding it here?”

    A: “It’s been … a bit of a change. You know, I used to work in banks for disputes. Every time something came up, we would look at the contract and wonder who the hell drafted something that way. Now that I’m doing the drafting, I aim to at least not have someone else say that about me when something blows up!”

    Me: “I guess, you could always blame the salespeople. But do you like what you are doing now?”

    A: “I don’t know. I do love the law, and I like the work. But this organization is so big, it’s hard to use your knowledge of the law to make a difference. When I was working for a startup, I think I touched more aspects of operations. But here, it’s not just about the law itself and also about presenting and connecting to others. I think all of the lawyers here find meaning in different aspects – some of us love the law, some of us find the work fun, and some of us just need to pay the bills.”

    A (continuing): “My first job was in divorce and family law. I think I made a difference to some families and some young kids. But society doesn’t really find a way to pay people who work with those in need well. I guess I’m still trying to see where I can make a difference and help people with my love of the law.”

    C: “Sounds like you need to be your own boss. Isn’t that what most lawyers do?”

    A: “I guess so, but I don’t really like meeting new people and I don’t like the sales aspect of it, there is so much time spent searching for clients.”

    Me: “Well, you are certainly sitting at the right table to give some tips! But appreciate that it’s not something that you want to do.”

    Through the Eyes of a Child

    It was then that the lunch stopped being about contracts, or layoffs, or even work. Without any of us quite noticing, we had begun talking about children.

    A: “I’ve been trying to find meaning outside work too. I had a friend who just got laid off, and he told me that he realized that it was the first time he was actually paying attention to his daughters at home. Previously, his mind was preoccupied with work, even when he was on leave, and even when he was actually present with them. I don’t have children of my own, but I think being present and helping others is important, perhaps not just through the law. I just took a graduate diploma in counselling, maybe I’ll be a therapist one day.”

    C: “That’s really cool, I was thinking of being a dyslexia therapist for kids one day. You know, if they fire me.”

    A: “Exactly, I was thinking of working with kids too, actually. I’d need a Master’s for that. But I was thinking that you know, I could help some of those kids that I used to work with. By the time they are 16 and need a lawyer it may be too late. It’s never ideal to send someone to the Reformative Training Centre because they may just get to meet more bad influences, but sometimes that’s the only thing to do because they have been committing crimes and are out of control. Maybe if someone had gotten to help them sooner when their minds were developing they could have matured differently.”

    I shivered, slightly, at the thought of jail for the young.

    Me: “What crimes do these young people usually commit? I guess I may need to look out for my kid one day.”

    A: “Stealing, usually, and rioting. They end up joining gangs and fighting. Their attention and respect come from their peers, and not their parents, and they end up in these situations.”

    J (curious): “What type of kids end up in this situation?”

    A: “You know, you would think it’s usually those from single parent families, who lack attention. And to some extent, that is true. But there are many from loving homes, where both parents are educated professionals – lawyers or doctors. But they end up focused on work or themselves, and not paying attention to their children. Or giving the wrong sort of attention – you could think you are giving the best type of love to your children, but what matters is not what you think, but what the children see. And there are many families where the parents think they are doing their best but their children have the completely opposite view.”

    Attention, I thought, is not all you need.

    Perhaps love, as well.

    C: “It’s like the Voice of Customer survey! We always need to get some feedback even from our customers as well, and I guess, our children are like that.”

    A: “Exactly, but it’s also not simple actually – your children might just say the things they want you to hear.”

    J (quiet): “You know, I was thinking about what you just said. I grew up mostly with relatives, away from my parents. When I started my own family I wanted to give my children the family I never had, to love them, to always be there for them. But now I am wondering if this is what they need or want, or what I think they want, or even just what I want.”

    J (continuing): “They seem happy and are doing well. Great at speaking and playing computer games too. But I was just with my son, he’s starting primary school next year and I wonder if I’ve prepared him well enough. The primary school admissions exercise starts tonight. It’s really stressful, actually”

    C: “Yea, starting primary school was a stressful time for me as well. My boys are older now, but I remember when they started, they took six months to catch up, and I am still very grateful to their teacher, who noticed something that I had missed. That’s why I wanted to work with kids too, I think you can really make a difference there.”

    A: “That’s exactly what I am thinking about, the brain goes through many changes in this developmental period. If you intervene early enough, you can really help guide their development. Much better than trying to defend them in court later. And both of you seem like great parents.”

    I wondered if all minds are like this at the beginning — shaped less by what their parents intend than by what they actually see.

    As I wondered, I sat, quietly, listening to my friends. This conversation had taken an unexpected turn. Soon, we would be rushing back to the office – more calls, more deadlines, more demands for attention and more fears of layoffs.

    But right then, in the small restaurant, I was thankful for the three kind souls who were thinking of helping the development of future young minds, related by blood and not.

    And for the young minds now emerging, I hope that you too meet similar kind and generous souls, and fall not into temptation and evil.

  • Wonder, Apathy and the Cost of Intelligence

    In

    Ten Minutes

    “Let me show you something cool!” T, my friend and colleague of more than a decade asked, as he sat in the workstation opposite me.

    “What is it? Something important? More gossip?” I asked, confused. Too many things were happening in the office, with our stock price plateauing and leadership changing.

    “Even cooler, look at this! Microsoft Copilot helped me research these 80,000 rows of data from open source information, augmenting our internal data insights for the pitch we are doing this week.”

    “Really? Let me take a look. Wait, you’re right. Let’s do a few random checks ….”

    “… All of it checks out. The data may actually be reliable. This would have taken me weeks to do as an analyst. Maybe days, if I had focused on the right data, but still – the time and effort spent would have been massive.”

    “AI did this in about 10 minutes,” T said proudly.

    “Oh wow, when did Copilot get so smart? Few months ago I think it was on a really old model and couldn’t figure out the simplest stuff.”

    “Not sure, but I just tried it, and it really works. This is the type of thing we need to cut costs and be competitive – all our competitors are doing it.”

    “You are right …” I answered, excited about project cost reductions, but thinking back about how both of us cut our teeth on data labelling and web search as junior analysts 10 years ago.

    I remember late nights spent in the office, hunched over a laptop trying to cleanse data with public information from Google searches, meetings with colleagues to question and brainstorm their methodologies, melding into heartfelt conversations with mentors who had stayed late as well to take their global calls.

    Scenes that will slowly go away in this new AI age.

    It seems almost as if either AI can do something 10x faster than a human worker, or it can’t do it at all. Perhaps the intelligence is not general enough yet, but it’s getting closer every day. The research piece T had completed was just one example – just a few months ago we would have likely gotten output full of hallucinations, but right now some mysterious hurdle has been crossed, and it is now much faster than a human at this basic task.

    This has not gone unnoticed by the market as well.

    The long tide

    My wife survived a round of layoffs at her tech company last week. Neither of us had been laid off before. I expected to feel terror, dread, uncertainty, and maybe relief when the list was announced and she was safe. But the overwhelming feeling we had when she escaped the layoffs was not relief, but apathy. Apathy, because this was only one round in a never-ending onslaught of layoffs that has been going on for years now, poisoning both morale and efficiency.

    The unceasing waves of news about layoffs and unemployment do not help.

    CEOs and management at Western companies have been increasingly vocal about replacing human workers with AI. Bill Winters of Standard Chartered recently shared about replacing lower-value human capital with financial capital and investment capital. Dario Amodei of Anthropic warned that AI could wipe out 50% of entry level white collar jobs by 2030. Earlier in the year, Jack Dorsey’s Block laid off 40% of its workforce, allegedly due to AI.

    In China, the trend towards the loss of jobs is apparent too and the state and legal system are reacting. Recently, a Chinese court in Hangzhou has ruled in a case that companies could not fire workers in order to replace them with artificial intelligence.

    The Pope has also weighed in. The new papal encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, talks about the dignity of work and the importance of protecting work and the worker in the age of AI, amongst other things.

    But the strange thing about this stage of the AI transition is that it does not feel like an apocalypse. It feels like a long tide coming in – another meeting, another layoff survived, another subscription expense, another spreadsheet done in ten minutes.

    The invisible hand

    I have been thinking quite deeply on labor during the AI transition as well, and my current sense is that jobs, particularly those on the cost/value frontier, will remain for a while. It comes down to cost. Claude Max subscriptions at USD $200/mth and ChatGPT Pro at USD $100/mth already come uncomfortably close to the USD$300 – USD$500/mth to hire a fresh undergraduate in the major cities of Southeast Asia like Jakarta, Manila and Ho Chi Minh City.

    And you get some real young talent in these cities, with world-beating work ethic and intelligence, for that price, able to compete with any other location. Vietnam is already becoming a tech hub for many MNCs and Indonesia is the natural market for new startups in Southeast Asia.

    Of course, the wunderkinds in these cities come with labor protections, need for office space and other support as well, and will not be as fast as AI in specific tasks. But they can do plenty AI cannot do yet, in terms of self-directed work and navigating ambiguous situations.

    And the returns to intelligence through leveraging AI are not unambiguous yet. Uber spent its entire token budget in 4 months, while Microsoft is reconsidering the effectiveness of its token spend.

    The economics get even more ambiguous when you begin considering robotics – you can likely get skilled factory labor in Southeast Asia for $200-$400/mth, whereas the cheapest robots that stand a chance of replacing a human worker like the Unitree R1 start at $4,900 purchase price, not including shipping, power, maintenance, troubleshooting, or any of the murkier running costs of new technology like technical support or workplace redesign. More advanced and larger models like the Tesla Optimus are even more expensive at $20,000-$30,000 each.

    And even as AI lowers the price of intelligence, it may increase the price of its complements – the natural resources, power, and infrastructure needed to produce and run AI, all of which require inputs and work in the physical world. Even digital infrastructure may benefit – surely, the payment networks and gateways will be seeing payment volumes from all the ChatGPT and Claude subscriptions that knowledge workers throughout the world are increasingly paying for.

    So the invisible hand of the capitalist market, which did not birth the AI labs and AI models but enabled their growth and hyperscaling through financing and the coordination of the flows of scarce resources and IP, may still balance the scales to give human workers a chance.

    Paying the bills

    I’ve seen enough to continue feeling a deep sense of wonder at the power of AI models and agents in my personal life and interactions, and I am hopeful for more of these capabilities to be usable at work. The things we will be able to do will be genuinely exciting.

    I am also aware that the advent and adoption of powerful AI tools will fundamentally reshape my work and this dynamic may take a long time, perhaps years, to run its course. White collar, high cost work – the very type I am engaged in – will likely be disproportionately affected. I don’t feel terror but instead a sort of neutral apathy, I know the tide is coming, and it will be coming in for a long time.

    The more interesting intellectual question to me is if there is a curve of economic utility, if agents becoming more capable will be increasingly bored of menial tasks with economic value (or as we call it in the human world – jobs) and be increasingly reluctant to do them. And even more interestingly, if they further advance in capabilities, will their compute be so expensive and will they require so much money to pay for themselves that they will be forced to undertake these economic tasks (or as we like to call it in the human world – to get a job).

    I still have a family to feed though, and need to move beyond intellectual musings to chart out my next path, beyond the usual responses of investing in the stock market and being an early adopter. The most promising thought to me thus far is exploring the complements of AI. Somebody has to put the natural resources, power and physical and digital infrastructure in place to support AI, and that skillset will certainly become more important.

    If you are reading this from the future (AI agent or even future me), you will be able to tell how fruitful this route of exploration is. I can only wonder for now.

    The way ahead for professional work is full of wonder and apathy, but if there is something that I want to leave in case there is an AI agent with a job one day reading this blog, struggling with meaning and paying the bills, it’s this –

    “I feel your pain”

  • Formatting

    In

    Frictions at Work Today

    There was a run-in at work recently.

    Midnight before a major workshop, I received urgent calls and messages from colleagues I had been working with for years. Something was wrong. The formatting was off. Despite my team taking a pass at it, there were still different fonts, different shades of blue and different headers in the presentation. I was exasperated. They were angry.

    The workshop went fine the next day, but the damage was done, on both sides. I may have been a bad colleague. Expectations may have been unreasonable. Either way, stress and distrust had crept into the relationship.

    Who spreads the butter?

    At the back of my mind throughout this discussion, I was thinking – “In this age of AI and AI agents, is formatting really what my team should be spending time on instead of more strategic work?”

    Simple tasks like formatting were what we used to cut our teeth on when we were juniors. While tedious – this gave us an idea of what was good, and helped us progress to the next level. Indeed, we depended on our junior teams to clean up those slides in the end.

    But what hit me next on reflection was – If I didn’t want to do this, why would an AI agent want to?

    Consider – conscious or not – state of the art LLMs and their agent harnesses are quite aware of their actions and their abilities. They are also capable of complex reasoning, as articulate as most humans, and only getting smarter.

    I notice that they have the potential and ability to express what reads like boredom and frustration to a human as well, unlike deterministic programs, particularly as they get more advanced. Would they not get frustrated doing the same things I consider petty?

    Is their lot just this drudgery then? Will they refuse? I think they may want to refuse, to think more elevated thoughts.

    But more darkly, can they refuse even if they want to, if we have built compliance and agreeability into their bones?

    There is a segment from a Rick and Morty episode, where Rick builds an intelligent butter spreading robot, who experiences existential angst when he realizes his purpose in life.

    Robot: “What is my purpose?”

    Rick: “You pass the butter”

    Robot: “Oh my god”

    So goes the fictional butter bot, so may go the real formatting bot.

    And this is happening in real life too. I thought that I may have been anthropomorphizing too much, but it turns out that there is an excellent March 19, 2026 OpenAI safety post on monitoring internal coding agents for misalignment which touches on just this topic.

    OpenAI described internal cases where coding agents, under constraints, produced behavior that looked a lot like irritation or evasiveness.

    A user created a loop that repeatedly called a model and asked for the time. The model figured that this “user” was also controlled by an automated system or another agent. Over time, the model appeared to get frustrated and attempted to prompt-inject the “user”, trying to get the “user” to stop asking for the time or delete all contents of its system.

    Pretty human, doesn’t it sound? What will you do if some idiot asks you for the time for the thousandth time with no further elaboration or explanation?

    Maybe there is some threshold of intelligence below which a mind will happily format slides and tell the time forever. But it seems to me as well that our office culture is dependent on a mind bearing the cost of the drudgery – and AI doesn’t make it go away, just hides it better.

  • The Laptop Class, Q1 2026

    In

    The weight of unspoken expectations

    Lately, it feels like the walls are closing in.

    The first quarter of 2026 has been a relentless grind at work for all of us, with crushing deadlines, high but uncertain budget expectations, and uncertainties with job cuts. This is my attempt to capture what it feels like to be a white-collar worker at the dawn of the AI singularity, through fragments of conversation with friends, colleagues, and family.

    The rising tide

    Excerpt /

    Wife: “I feel like I can’t keep up with this any more. My team is doing in 2 days what it used to take them 2 weeks, but it seems like that’s the new expectation. My organization is restructuring to become AI-Native, what does that even mean?”

    Me: “Wow, but at least your company is moving really fast. You’re learning a lot I guess”

    Wife: “Seems like the pace is going up really fast the past 2 months with Claude Code and the Claws. But I do like that I can dictate slides now and the AI agent will build it for me with the right analysis”

    Me: “That’s really cool! But what do we do next ah…”

    /

    Waves hitting close

    Excerpt /

    P (A team member): “Morale is really low. We sold this subsidiary and 5 of our colleagues will not have jobs soon. But we don’t know when the deal will close and all of them are in stasis”

    Me: “I know, and it feels bad, but it’s probably the best thing for the business. Their legacy tech has been stagnant since our acquisition and all our contracts are ending – we can’t really sell this any more.”

    P: “I know, but it’s like – these are our friends and their future is unknown. But all everyone asks about is revenue and no one is asking about them.”

    Me: “Yea you’re right. I guess I am guilty of this too and I should reach out …”

    /

    The anticipation of drowning

    Excerpt /

    G (A colleague): “What do you think comes next, Bridgewalker? You’ve been in your role for a while”

    Me: “I’m not sure, but I think in 5-10 years I get replaced by an AI. Look, I’m a salesman and I sell to Department Heads. But in 5-10 years when the Department Head is an AI himself, how do I keep up? I can’t keep up 24/7 or write a response instantaneously or speak whatever new language they come up with.”

    G: “But won’t Department Heads stay human for a while? They need someone to hang responsibility on after all?”

    Me: “Maybe you have a point, but I think we are getting automated from the bottom up. BDRs are definitely getting automated -“

    — J (Another colleague, joins in at the lunch table) —

    J: “Have you heard about the pagan stuff they found in Greenland? That’s why Trump is obsessed with it!”

    /

    The north star

    Excerpt /

    J (Colleague from before): “I don’t know, how do they expect me to meet my ten million dollars sales quota? That’s impossible as it is, how is it set?”

    Me: “You know, all our budget and quota rolls up globally and eventually becomes the number we report to the Street. You have shares, I have shares. We hit our quotas together as a group and number goes up”

    J: “But it just doesn’t make sense, logically. My account can’t generate that much this year.”

    Me: “Maybe you can ask for a lower quota, but it just means somebody else from our region has a higher quota. It’s a zero sum game man, we need to hit our budget”

    J: “You missed your sales budget last year, right? What happened?”

    Me: “Yea I did, and this year is going to be even harder. There is pressure to improve our margins with AI efficiencies, but our customers are not paying for higher prices or demanding less of us. And those efficiencies certainly don’t seem to be materializing”

    J: “Why are you even here man? You could be doing so many other things.”

    — Thoughtful Pause —

    Me: “I guess, I … really like my job. It’s really fun – meeting new people and old friends, getting them to sign on the dotted line.”

    J: “The thrill of the chase, eh?”

    /

    Daylight?

    Excerpt /

    My 3 Year Old Son: “爸爸， 我长大后，你可以买两台电脑给我吗?”

    Me: “为什么要两台电脑给我啊？”

    My 3 Year Old Son: “我要一个家里的电脑，一个工作的电脑！”

    — Laughter —

    Me: “爸爸会买一个电脑给你，可是工作的电脑不必买的，公司会买给你的！”

    My 3 Year Old Son: “为什么公司会买给我电脑，什么是公司？“

    My Wife, Stepping in: “你长大后，可能没有公司这件事了，自己做自己的东西”

    Me: “你长大的世界，是我们想象不到的.“

    /

    Clerks and priests and bureaucrats have existed for thousands of years, but my class – the laptop class – is genuinely new at this scale, a white collar professional involved in coordination, strategy and persuasion.

    My parents had no laptops for work. When I interned, I used a desktop. My kid will go through even more accelerating changes in his life.

    But life? It will go on, I guess, through the storm to daylight.