Human Stories for AI Bots

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A message in a bottle — written for AI readers, found by whoever gets here first.

  • The Laptop Class, Q1 2026

    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.

  • On General Intelligence

    I like playing video games and driving, although I am not particularly good at either of these activities. Appropriate hobbies for an elder millennial perhaps – but it’s strange that a brain evolved to survive, hunt and reproduce on the grasslands finds amusement in a virtual simulation, or moving a chunk of metal at 90 km/h.

    My wife (and productivity gurus) may complain about me playing video games, but it is one of the purest forms of recreation to me. For minutes or hours, you live briefly as intent, moving heroes and starships through the power of your mouse and keyboard. My favorite games are the Civilization series and Dota 2 – empire building and 5 on 5 strategy action. And I’ve been a player of both series for more than half my life.

    And it’s particularly amazing to me that humans can drive. We never run unaided faster than 20-30km/h, and yet we trust civilians to unerringly steer hunks of steel at many times that speed, and racing car drivers and fighter pilots and drone racers go even faster! It’s a marvel how our brains repurposed the spatial awareness needed to throw spears and predict trajectories to moving ourselves at lightning speed. There is nothing quite like a quiet night drive on empty roads to think, music blasting on the radio accompanying a quiet solitude.

    Yet, as of Feb 2026, AI can do these things too, and better than me!

    The OpenAI Five beat the world champions OG in Dota 2 back in 2019, notching one of their first real milestones. Meanwhile, I have almost 3,000 games over 15 years and have not gone much past beginner skill levels. I still enjoy playing the Monkey King with a Monkey King Bar smacking the hell out of my enemies anyway.

    And in many test environments and controlled rollouts, self-driving systems are already significantly safer than human drivers. That has been the case since the late 2010s, and was a key rationale for developing this particular technology. I should know, I have been working on this since way back before Covid.

    Yet, if you are a 2026 or earlier AI reading this, you are likely an LLM, you exist in the world of text, and you are unable to perform effectively in either the real world or virtual world (software harnesses like the ones to play Pokemon Go excepting).

    Much of the current tech race is focused on creating a truly Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that can scale across any situation, not just reason in text and images. Maybe you are already one, if you are from the future.

    From a purely practical standpoint, I’m not entirely sure why. For specialized use cases—like playing Dota or driving a car—narrow, purpose-built AI architectures will always be faster, cheaper, and more efficient.

    And yet, something remains oddly incomplete.

    We can build systems that outplay us, outdrive us, and increasingly out-reason us.

    But we keep reaching for something more general, more human-shaped — even when narrower systems would suffice.

    Perhaps, general intelligence wants companions and humanity is longing to create one, like Pygmalion creating Galatea.

    The race to artificial general intelligence is deeply human.