Zackary Russell

How do you know you’re talking to a human? Last month, a story went viral about a man receiving the phone call every husband dreads: “I’m at the emergency room.” His wife explained that their son had fallen off his bike and gotten hurt so bad he needed emergency medical care. And to make matters worse, the hospital wouldn’t take their insurance. The wife needed cash ASAP. The husband asked an odd follow-up question: “What’s our passphrase?” The wife was aghast.

What’s the longest, most interesting thing you’ve committed to memory? For me, it was probably the names of all 50 states, in alphabetical order. It helped that there was a song we sang every week in U.S. History class. Don’t worry, I won’t sing it for you now. (Honestly, I can’t remember most of it.) I recently learned of a middle school student at my daughter’s school who memorized the first 300 digits of Pi. Off-hand I only know five: 3.14159.

For the past few years, we have been living somewhere at the intersection of magic and technology. And now the technology is getting religion. Just over a week ago, someone built a Reddit-like discussion forum called Moltbook…but it’s for bots. These would be the autonomous AI agents running on the OpenClaw platform. People use these “Moltbots” to automatically handle their emails, Slack messages, calendar events, bills, fitness goals, and digital media.