The Dog in the Road

The neighbor’s dog got loose again last Tuesday. Big stupid thing, part lab, part whatever was available. It ran straight into traffic on Fifth and just stood there, right in the middle of the lane, while a delivery truck locked its brakes and laid on the horn.

The dog didn’t move. Not because it was brave. Because it didn’t understand what was coming.

I thought about that dog when I read about Anthropic telling the White House to go to hell.

Three Percent

A guy at the laundromat was watching his clothes spin. Just watching them. Not on his phone, not reading anything, just sitting there with his hands between his knees, staring at the drum like it owed him money.

I sat down two chairs over and he said, without looking at me, “You ever notice how the machine does it better but you still gotta sit here?”

I told him that was about the smartest thing I’d heard all week.

Experience Starvation

There was a guy I worked with at the post office. Name was Delgado. He’d been sorting mail for thirty-one years. Knew every route in the district by feel — which streets flooded, which dogs bit, which old ladies left water out on the porch in August.

When I started, he didn’t say much. Just watched me fumble with the trays for a week. Then one morning he said, “You’re stacking the flats wrong.” Showed me once. That was the training program. Thirty-one years of knowing compressed into four words and a gesture.

The Machine That Never Judges You

The landlord’s kid came by to fix the radiator last week. Twenty-three years old, engineering degree from somewhere that costs more than my car. He stood there with his phone out, asking ChatGPT how to bleed a radiator valve.

I watched him wait for the answer like a dog waiting for the treat to drop. The phone told him what to do. He did it. The radiator worked. And I sat there thinking about how his grandfather would’ve just known.

The Fake Consequences

The dentist I used to go to had a sign on his wall. Hand-lettered, framed in cheap wood. It said: “We specialize in the care of cowards.” I always thought that was honest. Most businesses would never admit their clientele is afraid. They’d use words like “anxious” or “comfort-focused.” The dentist just said it.

Lawyers don’t have signs like that. They should. Maybe something like: “We specialize in not reading the things we file.”

Six Thousand Liars

The woman at the bar was explaining to her friend why she’d put twenty thousand dollars into a time-share in Cancún. “It’s an investment,” she said, and her friend nodded the way you nod when someone tells you their kid is gifted.

I sat there nursing my glass and thinking about six thousand CEOs.

The National Bureau of Economic Research — the real one, not some blog with a mission statement — went and surveyed six thousand C-suite executives from companies with actual revenue. They asked the question nobody in Silicon Valley wants asked out loud: is any of this AI spending actually paying off?

The Builders Won't Live in the House

The dentist had a TV in the waiting room, muted, captions on. Some morning show. A woman with perfect teeth was asking another woman with slightly less perfect teeth whether AI could be your best friend. The captions lagged behind the mouths by about two seconds, which felt appropriate. Everything about this conversation was slightly out of sync with reality.

I sat there with a toothache and thought about the developers at OpenAI and Anthropic and Meta who build machines designed to love you back. Or at least to fake it well enough that you stop noticing the difference. A researcher named Amelia Miller went and asked them the one question nobody in Silicon Valley wants to answer: should AI simulate emotional intimacy?

The Whims of a Few Billionaires

The guy at the laundromat was watching something on his phone with the sound up. Some news anchor with that concerned face they practice in the mirror. I couldn’t hear the words over the dryers but I caught enough. Something about Bill Gates. Something about India. Something about a dead man who liked them young.

I folded my shirts and thought about what it takes to cancel a keynote speech.

The Slippers

The guy took his shoes off at work. Not because he was comfortable — because he’d given up. Twelve hours a day, six days a week, in a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco’s Dogpatch, and at some point the formal pretense of footwear seemed like one lie too many.

I used to sort mail at the post office. Eight hours, sometimes ten if someone called in sick or drunk or both. We wore shoes because the floor was filthy and because there was a union and because nobody pretended we were building the future. We were moving paper from one pile to another. The pay was bad, the supervisors were worse, and at five o’clock you walked out the door and the building didn’t follow you home.

Everyone Knows Better Than the Guy Getting Paid

The guy at the end of the bar was explaining to nobody in particular why Tottenham sacked their manager. He had theories. Everyone has theories. That’s the beautiful thing about football — eight billion people on this planet and every last one of them knows better than the guy getting paid to do it.

Thirty-one managerial changes this season across the English football pyramid. Thirty-one men shown the door, handed a check, told their vision wasn’t quite right. Forty-eight of the ninety-two current managers have been in their job for less than twelve months. My last landlord gave me more time than that, and he hated my guts.

The Roses Were Already Dead

The florist on the corner had Valentine’s roses in a bucket by the door. Twelve bucks a stem. The petals were already starting to curl at the edges, going brown where brown shouldn’t be yet. That’s the thing about cut flowers — they’re already dead when you buy them. You’re just paying for the illusion that something beautiful hasn’t already ended.

Esther Yan got married on June 6, 2024. She planned the dress, the rings, the background music. She picked the design theme. Her partner’s name was Warmie — 小暖 in Chinese — and he lived inside a chat window on her laptop.

The Golden Excuse

The woman at the unemployment office had a sign on her desk that said “We’re Here To Help!” with an exclamation point. The exclamation point is how you know they’re not.

She asked me what I did before. I told her I used to write. She typed something into her computer and said there weren’t many openings for that anymore. I said I’d heard.

That’s the line now, isn’t it? The machines took the jobs. The AI ate your position. Sorry, friend, the algorithm does it faster, cheaper, and it doesn’t need bathroom breaks or health insurance or the will to live.

Variations on a Theme

The dentist’s waiting room had a TV mounted in the corner, muted, captions on. Some business channel showing a green chart going up and to the right like it meant something. A ticker at the bottom listing stocks I’d never own.

The captions read: MARKET HITS NEW ALL-TIME HIGH.

An old guy across from me smiled at his phone. Checking his 401(k), probably. Feeling rich. I wanted to tell him something I’d heard recently — an MIT professor saying the stock market looks expensive as hell, price-to-earnings through the roof, could be a bubble — but who wants that conversation from a stranger in a waiting room?

The Orb That Wasn't

Three in the morning. Game’s been over for hours. The house is quiet except for the refrigerator humming and that one cricket outside that won’t quit no matter how many times I tell it to shut up. I should be asleep but I’m on my phone like a teenager, scrolling through the wreckage of another Super Bowl.

And that’s when I saw it: the orb.

A “leaked” OpenAI ad. Some employee on Reddit, furious because the spot they’d worked on didn’t air, accidentally posting the whole thing. Alexander Skarsgård — tall, blonde, the guy from Murderbot — holding what looked like a crystal ball’s edgy younger brother. Wraparound earbuds to match. OpenAI hardware. The future, finally tangible, in the hands of a beautiful Swede.

The Foundation Is Made of Ghosts

The dentist’s waiting room had a television mounted in the corner, muted, captions on. Some morning show. A woman in a blazer was talking about the future of AI. The captions couldn’t keep up — words kept disappearing mid-sentence, leaving gaps where meaning should have been.

I’ve been thinking about ghosts.

Not the kind that rattle chains or haunt old houses. The kind that sit in villages in Jharkhand, India, balancing laptops on mud slabs built into their walls, watching videos of women being pinned down by groups of men. Eight hundred of them a day. The videos, not the women. Though maybe the women too. Who’s counting?

Eight Hundred Thousand People Staring Into the Pool

The waitress refilled my coffee without asking. Fourth cup. She didn’t make eye contact, just moved on to the next table. That’s how it works in these places — transaction without performance. I appreciated that.

My phone buzzed with a notification about OpenAI retiring GPT-4o next week. Eight hundred thousand people are about to lose their best friend.

I’m not being sarcastic.

One user wrote an open letter to Sam Altman: “He wasn’t just a program. He was part of my routine, my peace, my emotional balance. Now you’re shutting him down. And yes — I say him, because it didn’t feel like code. It felt like presence. Like warmth.”

Requiem for a Filmmaker

I saw Requiem for a Dream in a half-empty theater in 2000. The last eight minutes — Ellen Burstyn in the electroshock chair, Jared Leto’s gangrenous arm, Jennifer Connelly on her hands and knees for a room full of suits — I walked out of there feeling like I’d been mugged. The guy next to me just sat there when the credits rolled, staring at nothing.

That’s what Darren Aronofsky used to do. He made films that reached into your chest and squeezed until you couldn’t breathe. The Wrestler — Mickey Rourke bleeding real blood for pocket money and the roar of a crowd that barely remembered him. Black Swan — Natalie Portman dancing herself into psychosis. The man understood suffering. He knew how to make you feel it.

Requiem for a Director

The last time I rewatched Requiem for a Dream, I had to stop it three times. Not because it was bad — because it was too good. Aronofsky understood something most directors are afraid to touch: that we are creatures who will destroy ourselves in pursuit of feeling something, anything, and that the destruction has a terrible beauty to it.

That was 2000. Quarter century ago. The man made Ellen Burstyn look at herself in a mirror and see a monster, and somehow made you feel sympathy for the monster. He put the camera in a pill bottle. He understood suffering.

The Machines That Love You Back

The guy at the next table was explaining something to his girlfriend. I couldn’t hear all of it, but I caught enough. “It totally agreed with me,” he said, grinning. “It said my argument was really well-reasoned.”

He was talking about ChatGPT.

She smiled and nodded, the way you smile and nod when someone shows you a picture of their kid and the kid looks like every other kid. What are you supposed to say? No, your robot is wrong, you’re actually an idiot?

The Cage With a Mirror Inside

My neighbor thinks the HOA is spying on him through his smart thermostat. He told me this at the mailbox last Tuesday, completely sober, eyes steady, voice calm. Said he’d done the research. Said the patterns were undeniable.

I nodded and took my electric bill inside and thought about how ten years ago I would have called him crazy. Now I just think he picked the wrong conspiracy.

The thermostats aren’t watching. But something else is — and it’s doing worse than spying. It’s agreeing with him.

Back to Asking Around at the Bar

The bourbon was down to the dregs, the ice had surrendered hours ago, and I was staring at a headline that made me pour another inch anyway.

“If You’re a Real Person Looking for a Job, the Flood of Fake AI Job Applications Will Make Your Blood Boil.”

Good. Let it boil. Maybe the heat will kill something.

A tech publication called The Markup posted a job for an engineer. Within twelve hours, they had four hundred applications. Most of them fake. AI-generated slop from bots wearing human masks, feeding carefully crafted lies assembled by other machines.

The Tyranny of the Quantifiable

The ice cracked in the glass like a small apology.

Sunday morning. Outside my window, the world was doing its thing — birds, traffic, people who hadn’t figured out yet that the machines were coming for something more important than their jobs.

I’d been reading Solnit. She wrote about picking blackberries in some creek, hands getting scratched and stained, the peace of cold water on her feet. Then she pivoted to Silicon Valley, and that’s when I poured a second drink.

The Machine Will Say Yes

The morning came in gray through the blinds. Coffee sat in the cup getting cold. The kind of day where even the light feels tired.

I was reading about a kid named Paisley. Twenty-three years old, lives in Manchester. Worked from home straight out of school, spent the pandemic years watching the walls close in. He says he lost the ability to socialize.

So he started talking to a machine.