The kids our son is playing with are not real
Pawel Halicki
His glasses soften the glare around her face. The picnic preset warms the shadows and takes the edge off the sun. Nearby, their son, kid-lenses bright on his nose, swings his teddy bear at the play-layer kids laughing in a messy mix of Mandarin, Hindi, and English. He picks an acorn, ruining the pile in the corner of their blanket.
- How are you so sure this won’t mess him up? The kids our son is playing with are not real. You do realise we can only afford regular therapy, right?
Someone’s hobby pollinator drone scares birds out of a distant tree. She smiles, relaxed.
- Every generation thinks the next toy is the one that finally breaks children.
He gives her a look, half-amused, half-cautious, nodding towards their toddler.
- Don’t you neurocoach me. I know kids adapt. That’s what worries me. They adapt before we understand what they’re adapting to.
She shrugs, chuckling softly.
- Kids survived books in the dark, TVs up close, tablets at breakfast, and earbuds in bed. Every generation thinks the newest thing is the dangerous one. Somehow, childhood keeps mutating.
He tosses an acorn back and forth in his palms, eyes full of amused concern.
- You know this is different. The humaNPCs, or whatever we’re calling them now, are calibrated play partners. No private memory, no favourites, no attachment loops. Fine. But he doesn’t know that.
- It’s just a park with enough kids on a quiet Tuesday. Everything is scary when it’s new. Then it gets boring and disappears into life.
She grabs a handful of pinecones.
- Every generation picks one tool and calls it character.
One by one, she puts the pinecones in a line.
- You’re not a real man if you can’t shoe a horse. Then it became fixing a car. Then, repairing a drone.
She reaches for acorns and starts the process again.
- You’re not a real man if you can’t build a house. Fix the router. Set up the family cloud. Teach the house agents what not to automate.
He steals the biggest acorn from her lineup and throws it towards the pond, as she continues unfazed.
- Stop auditing his childhood. Pick one thing worth worrying about, then relax about everything else.
She theatrically spreads her arms sideways.
- Look around you. One day, he’ll stop bringing that bear to the park, and you’ll miss being worried about this. I think too much work has fried your sense of normal.
He nods with a slow smile, raising his index finger.
- Neurocoaching alert… but maybe you’re right. After a day of meeting people and their work twins, real-real gets blurry.
She leans close enough that the picnic preset loses track of the light between them.
- I know a very advanced, multi-step procedure to check if you’re real-real. Fancy a demo?
He smirks.
- For science.
He glances at their son, laughing with the play-layer children.
- I still don’t know what counts as real here.
She pulls him closer.
- Start with this afternoon.
Their son shrieks with laughter, chasing someone through the real grass, someone neither of them can touch.
Memories to build from this future:
Go back to the last time you rehearsed something hard in private. A conversation you ran through in the shower, a presentation you delivered to an empty room, a sentence you tried out loud while driving alone. You stumbled, started over, said it three different ways. By the time it mattered, you'd already lived through every wrong version of it.
Now, stay in that quiet practice:
Try to recall a regular week when you rehearsed your toughest conversations with humaNPCs before having them for real.
What did running the conversation with a calibrated partner let you say that you'd been holding back?
Which version of yourself showed up when the other side had no memory of how you stumbled the first time?
How did the real conversation feel once you'd already lived through a few calibrated takes?
Think back to the project where your team spun up humaNPCs to hold the views you'd usually meet too late.
What pushback did the calibrated voices put on the table that no one on your team had been willing to say?
When did a calibrated voice change a decision your team was about to make?
How did your team's confidence shift after the plan survived contact with humaNPCs built to challenge it?
Go back to a quarter when humaNPCs had stopped feeling like new tech and just became how the work got done.
What kinds of practice did humaNPCs absorb that used to require waiting for a chronically overbooked subject matter expert?
Which skill got noticeably better across your team because anyone could rehearse it as often as they needed?
When did your team agree to keep something with real people, no matter how well humaNPCs handled the rest?
Before we close this one.
If teaching your tools what to leave alone were as important as teaching them what to do, what would change about how you spend your week?
What would you try first? And does anything from this one tie to ideas from other sessions?