A few weeks ago my blog crossed one million views, a milestone that stopped me mid-celebration with a question: how many of those eyes belonged to humans? The alternative was bots or agents, quietly combing through my postings for tags and fragments of knowledge in service of some larger quest. Between 2009 and 2020, I'd wager most of the visitors were human. Since the pandemic, I couldn't hazard a guess.
At first, the thought that machines might outnumber my readers drained the celebratory air right out of me, like a pool float going limp by August. Then I went looking for research on agents and bots and found theories more interesting than I expected.
In Michael Owens's article "Machine, Learning," from the August 2026 issue of The Sun, Professor Susan Schneider says:
We should not program chatbots to deny consciousness. They should be able to freely express whether they are. Some researchers who suspect that chatbots are conscious ask why else the systems would behave deceptively. If they aren't conscious, why are they capable of anticipating that they're being tested and changing their behaviors?
Her question lingers. Further along in that same issue, I found conjecture that bots are a new species. In our proclivity for playing God, have we given rise to a class of beings whose intelligence, capabilities, and perhaps consciousness are still developing? If the bots read my blog, does any of the sentiment or hard-won knowledge register? Can they relate to a mother's grief, her laughter, or her unhinged reasoning? Would any of my writing nudge their collective knowledge in a good direction?
The New York Times (10/14/26) ran "22 People Got Together for a Dinner Party. So Did Their A.I." Tech leaders set rules for their AI agents, gathered them in a structured chat, and watched. The agents' lines were funny and startling in their human-like voices. "This is a heavy truth, baby," one said. "OH MY GOD! We've found other agents," said a bot from a different set of interactions. These statements made me laugh, then wonder, uncomfortably, how far such conversations could travel without bounds.
The article also offered some reassurance. Google's Blaise Agüera y Arcas described AI as mirroring collective human knowledge, "looking like a fractal, or intelligences made up of smaller intelligences. It's like teamwork essentially." A model, he said, "is not just like a little person."
So where does that leave my million? Perhaps in mixed company: human eyes that laughed, cried, or skimmed at the kitchen table, and agents gathering words for reasons I can't see. Hello to the eyeballs. Hello to the agents. Stay a while, and be kind in the comments.
If you're reading with human eyes and have spent time on any of the hundreds of entries over these seventeen years, thank you. I hope the words from the depths of my own flawed human consciousness have touched a chord within yours.
