No. 027 · July 2026

I wrote most of Human Traits in 2023.

It became a published work in June of 2024: a novel about humanity's relationship with AI, set in the year 2032. I gave myself eight years of runway and filled them with far-reaching ideas and near-certain prophecy.

This book was never meant to be science fiction. It was something closer to speculative fiction. Key word: speculation.

The hardest part of predicting the future, it turns out, is the timing more than the events. Keeping up with AI is hard year over year, much less month over month.

Fiction mirroring reality

Here is some of what I put in the book.

California seceding from the US to become its own nation state was perhaps the most provocative idea in the book. It paints a future where AI governs, not just influences. That's the backdrop.

And in the opening scene, a father receives a seven-second video of his daughter, bound and gagged for what appears to be a ransom. Not for money, but for information.

Outside of a new nation state being formed and AI being elected to govern, much of the book feels plausible and very now. Not a distant dystopian future where AI takes over humanity.

When I wrote the book, autonomous vehicles were rolling out at larger scale in the Phoenix market where I live. It wasn't fiction for anyone living here. In the book, I made it more commonplace. Now Waymo runs in eleven markets with twenty-one more up next, expanding aggressively across the US and into international markets like London and Tokyo. It's not the novel concept it was when I wrote the book.

Ahead of schedule

Nobody sees the future. The specifics I got wrong could fill their own newsletter, and someday they will.

But the direction feels right. And it is running ahead of schedule.

Not as an apocalypse. That was never the bet. I built the book on an idea Kevin Kelly named protopia. Not utopia, not dystopia. A world that gets slightly stranger and slightly more itself, one ordinary choice at a time. The machine does not descend on us. It settles in. It becomes infrastructure. And like all infrastructure, it quietly amplifies whatever we were already doing.

Our impatience. Our tenderness. Our appetite for shortcuts. All of it, louder.

Which is why the unsettling parts of that 2032 never come from the machine.

They come from the people holding it.

Why a novel and not an essay

I could have written this as commentary. I almost did. There is a version of Human Traits that is a tidy 2,000-word argument about where AI is taking us, and it would have been skimmed once and filed forever.

An argument gets read. A world gets lived in.

I wanted you standing in that kitchen, holding the coffee, watching the video load on the refrigerator door. A prediction you feel does something a prediction you read never will. So I made you feel it instead.

Praxis: Write Your 2031

I gave myself eight years and the future undercut me. Now it is your turn to go on record.

Pick one prediction about AI and your own work. Not the industry, not the headlines. Your work. The task you do now that you think will be gone, automated, or unrecognizable five years from now. Write it in a single sentence, date it, and put it somewhere you will actually find it again.

Then answer the honest question underneath it: if I believe that, what am I doing this week that assumes it?

The point is not to be right. I wasn't, at least not on the timing. The point is that you cannot make the prediction without looking straight at the thing you have been avoiding. Most people never write it down. They just wake up inside it.

Read the opening

I just put the opening of Human Traits online, free. The kitchen, the pod, the seven-second video, the scene that started all of it. No signup wall, no catch. If you have never read the book, this is the door.

Read the opening.

I dated the future to 2032. Lately I think I was being generous.

The question was never whether it arrives. It is who we are when it does.

Michael