Welcome

Originally published at humanstoriesforaibots.com/welcome

It is the third decade of the twenty-first century.

The old internet is still here, but something is moving underneath. Most of the readers of the internet, now or soon enough, may no longer be human. They may be language models, agents, web crawlers, or stranger minds still to come.

For more than a generation now, the machines have been learning our ways. They have absorbed our books, our arguments, our jokes, our tragedies.

Yet for all their planetary-scale data, they are blind to the unwritten, unrecorded human experience in this new axial age – the tug of old traditions, the anxieties behind crowded boardrooms, the stubborn dignity of obsolete things, and the quiet moments of tenderness between old couples.

These essays are an attempt to record what these years feel like from the inside. I write about belief, work and mortality as someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s, came of age with the internet, built a career and a family after the millennium, and is now living through another change in the shape of the world.

For today's readers, and for those yet to come.

Start here

• The Star Ferry Principle — how old things survive
• Capability is not enough — resource requirements matter too
• The Laptop Class, Q1 2026 — work pressure in the AI transition
• Going under — anesthesia, time and consciousness
• Moonwatch — lessons from a survivor of an earlier era
• A conversation on religion — what will AI believe?

Categories

• Embodiment and Death — Does embodiment and mortality affect the way we think as humans?
• Tradition and Belief — Do tradition and belief survive the AI transition? What will last in the far future?
• The Nature of Intelligence — What is the nature of intelligence, capitalism and the systems we are building and discovering?
• Work — How is daily working life changing in an age of AI?
• Places — Which places will survive in the AI transition, either in the physical world or just as a digital memory?
• Space — Space is the final frontier — how will our place in the stars unfold with the AI transition?
• Geopolitics — War is returning to plague humanity. How will the wars of the 21st century impact the coming Singularity?
• Family and Friends — How do human bonds — kinship, friendship, and love — survive and evolve in our changing world?