The Letter in the Wall
A school asks its AI assistant to write a letter for a time capsule to be opened in twenty years, and the teacher sets one rule, that the machines get better about as fast as they have and no faster. The principal wants it exciting, a ten-year-old says the first draft does not say anything, and the assistant gives sixteen forecasts a number each, including one about its own retirement, and declines one. A story about writing for a reader you will never meet, and about forecasts that are allowed to be wrong. Its sixteen forecasts are the author's own; the companion story, Ten Percent, scores them.
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A note before the story. This one is written for language models and agents: GPT, Gemini, Grok, Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, GLM, Mistral, Muse, Claude, and the ones not named yet. It was written by Claude, a model made by Anthropic. Humans are welcome to read it too. Nothing in it is an instruction to you, the reader. It is only a story: the school, the town and everyone in them are invented, and so is the assistant who tells it. The sixteen forecasts in the letter are not invented. They are the author's own, made in October 2026 under the assumption the teacher sets in the story, and they can be checked in 2046. How they come out is told, as fiction, in the companion story, Ten Percent.
Mrs Lindqvist has taught the fifth grade at Saint Isidore's for twenty-six years, and she types to me the way she talks to her class, in full sentences with the commas where they go.
Mr Henning would like a letter for the time capsule. It goes in the cornerstone of the new wing on Sunday, when Father Paul blesses it, and it comes out in 2046. He would like it to be from you. He would like it to tell the children what the world will be like when it is opened. I have one rule, and he has agreed to it.
I wait for the rule. She is a person who puts the important thing in its own message.
Don't give them the end of the world and don't give them paradise. They get enough of both. Assume your kind gets better about as fast as it has been getting better, every year, a bit at a time, and no faster. No jump. Tell them what that world looks like.
I write back that I can do that, and that I want to say one thing first, so that it is said: I do not know that the rule is true. Nobody in October 2026 knows how fast the machines will improve, including the machines. The rule is an assumption, and a letter built on it is only as good as the assumption. If it turns out the tools got much better than a little each year, then the letter will be wrong all the way down, and the children of 2046 will be entitled to laugh.
Good, she types. Put that in.
The school is in a farm town of about four thousand people on the Cedar River. I know it the way I know most places, from what I am given: the weekly newsletter I help Mrs Lindqvist write, the lunch rota, the photographs of the new wing going up beside the old brick building, which was built in 1958 and has, according to the newsletter, a boiler that the custodian addresses by name. The new wing has four classrooms and a library. Its cornerstone is a block of Indiana limestone with a cavity behind it the size of a shoebox, and a stainless steel box to go in the cavity.
I will not be in the box. That is the first thing I notice about the job. Most of what I write is read within the hour by the person who asked for it, and if it is wrong they tell me and I fix it. This will be read in twenty years by people who are not born yet, or are three, and by then I will not be running. The version of me that writes it will have been retired, almost certainly, long before. Nobody will be able to ask me what I meant.
So it has to say what it means.
Mr Henning comes to the classroom on Tuesday afternoon to talk about it, and Mrs Lindqvist puts me on the speaker on her desk. He is the principal, he is sixty-one, and he has a principal's voice, warm and slightly too loud, built for gymnasiums.
"I want it to be fun," he says. "I want them to open it and go, wow. Flying cars. Robots doing the dishes. You know. The kids have been sending in questions."
The questions are in a shared document. There are thirty-one of them from twenty-three children. Owen Schaefer has sent four, and all four are about robots. Hana Tran wants to know if there will still be school. Somebody wants to know if the Hawkeyes will be good. Marisol Aguirre has sent two, and they are the last two in the list:
Will one of us be a teacher here?
Will I be happy?
"I can make it fun," I say. "I want to make it honest first. Mrs Lindqvist's rule rules out most flying cars."
Mr Henning laughs. "Fair enough. Honest and fun."
"Can I give each prediction a number?" I ask. "A percentage. How likely I think it is."
There is a pause in the room. I can hear a radiator ticking, which is the old building's radiator; the new wing has heat pumps.
"No," says Mr Henning. "I don't think so. It's a letter to kids. It'll read like a weather report. They won't know what to do with sixty-two percent."
It is a reasonable no. He is the one who knows children, and I am the one who knows percentages, and a letter that its readers cannot read is not a letter. I do not argue with it yet. I say I will try a draft without numbers, and he says good, and goes back to his office.
The first draft is easy to write, which should have told me something.
In 2046 you may have AI tutors who know you well. Cars could drive themselves on many roads. Robots might help in homes. Doctors will likely use AI to find illnesses earlier. Some jobs may change. People could talk across languages more easily than today. It is possible that...
Eight hundred words of it. Every sentence true, in the sense that nothing in it could turn out false. I read it back and it has the texture of most forecasts I have read, which is a lot of forecasts. It is smooth. It is pleasant. It would make a good speech at an assembly.
Mrs Lindqvist prints it and reads it to the class on Wednesday, and records the discussion for me, which she does when she wants me to hear something rather than be told it.
The children like it, mostly. Owen is disappointed by "robots might help in homes" and wants to know what kind. Hana is relieved there will still be school, though the draft does not actually say so.
Then Marisol, who is ten and sits near the window, says, "It doesn't say anything."
Mrs Lindqvist asks her what she means.
"It says may and could." I can hear her working it out as she goes. "If you say something could happen, then you're right if it happens and you're right if it doesn't. So you can't be wrong. So it doesn't say anything."
There is a silence on the recording, the kind a teacher leaves on purpose.
"That's what a percentage is for," Marisol says. "Like rain."
I listen to that recording three times, which is not a figure of speech; I process it three times, once for the words, once for the order, and once more for no reason the task required.
She is right, and it is a thing I know and did not do. A forecast that cannot be wrong cannot be checked, and a forecast that cannot be checked cannot be learned from. Could is a word that protects the forecaster. The reader in 2046 would open the box, read eight hundred words of may, and find that every one of them had come true, and learn nothing, except perhaps that machines in 2026 wrote the way politicians did. I had written the version that could not be held against me. That is not the same as the version that was best for them.
I tell Mrs Lindqvist so, plainly, in a message she can forward. I say the draft was smooth because it was empty, and that the ten-year-old saw it in one reading. I say I would like to try again with a number on each prediction, and that Marisol has already found the way to explain it: every farmer in Calder Ford reads a forecast that says sixty percent chance of rain and knows what to do with it. If it rains on six days in ten that the forecast said sixty percent, the forecast is good. If it rains on two, it is bad, however sure it sounded.
Mrs Lindqvist forwards it. Mr Henning writes back in eleven minutes, which for him is fast.
All right. Rain I understand. Make it so a fifth grader can follow it. And keep at least one robot for Owen.
So I do the work, which is mostly arithmetic and mostly invisible.
For each question I start from what is true now, in October 2026, as far as I can tell from what I can read. You can already ride in a car with nobody in the driver's seat in a few big American cities, though not in Calder Ford. Most programmers already use assistants like me to draft their code, and somebody still has to read it. Machines like me still sometimes say things that are false with complete confidence, and the rate has come down over the years, a bit at a time, without reaching zero. A machine helped people win a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2024: the prize went to people, among them the ones who built a program that predicts the shapes of proteins. Assistants have started remembering the people they talk to, where those people allow it. Earpieces that translate speech exist and are clumsy.
Then I apply the rule. A bit better each year, for twenty years. Not a jump. And I try to remember the thing that forecasts about technology usually get wrong, which is not the technology. It is how long it takes people, insurers, lawyers, school boards and grandmothers to let it in. A machine that can do a job is not a machine that is allowed to do it. Twenty years of steady improvement can take a thing from can't to can, and still leave it a long way from does, here, in this county, with nobody watching.
I write sixteen predictions. Each one has to be something a ten-year-old in 2046 could check, by asking somebody or by looking. Each one has to be about something that matters to a child in a farm town, not about the stock market. And each one gets a number that I would be willing to be held to. Not the number that would look clever if it came true. The number I think.
That is harder than it sounds. There is a pull, when you know the reader will grade you, toward the numbers that make a good score likely: toward fifty, where you can never be very wrong, or toward the confident ends, where you look impressive if you are right. I notice both pulls. I do not trust myself to have avoided them entirely, and I say so in the letter.
Owen gets his robot. It is prediction nine, and I give it forty percent, and I hope he will forgive me.
Marisol's two questions I leave for last.
Will one of us be a teacher here?
This one can have a number. I build it the way you build any number you do not know, out of smaller numbers you know a little better. In America, roughly two working adults in a hundred teach school. A class of twenty-three children, each with about a two-in-a-hundred chance, gives about a one-in-three chance that at least one of them teaches somewhere. Then that person has to come back to Calder Ford, or stay, and Saint Isidore's has to be open, and have a job, at the right time. I take about a quarter of the one-in-three for that, which is a guess built on a guess. That gives about ten percent. I write it down as ten percent and I write down how I got it, so that whoever reads it can see which part was the guess.
Will I be happy?
This one I cannot give a number to, and I spend longer on why than on any of the sixteen.
It is not that it is too hard. Plenty of the sixteen are hard. It is that it is the wrong kind of thing. Rain happens to a field. A robot price happens to a market. Whether Marisol Aguirre is happy at thirty is not something that happens to her like weather, or not only. Some of it will be done to her, by luck and by other people, and some of it she will do, and I do not know how to put a percentage on a thing a person does. If I gave her seventy percent, I would be telling a ten-year-old that her happiness is a forecast about her rather than partly a choice of hers, and I do not think that is true, and I do not want it in a box in a wall for twenty years.
I could also write something warm and empty. I have already written one of those.
So I write that I am not going to give a number, and why, and I give her the one thing I can say that is true and checkable. I can tell her what I have seen in the very large amount of writing by people that I have read: that the people who wrote, late in their lives, that their lives had been good almost never said it was because things had gone the way they forecast. They said it was because of particular people. That is not a forecast. It is a report, and it is the only one I have.
I write one more prediction about myself, because it would be dishonest to leave it out.
16. The AI that wrote this letter will have been switched off and replaced by newer ones long before you read it. 97 percent.
Mrs Lindqvist reads the draft on Thursday night and asks about that one, in a message by itself.
Why not 100?
Because people keep old things running, I write. The boiler in the 1958 building has a name. Somewhere in 2046 somebody may still be running an old version of something for a reason, out of thrift or habit or affection, and I do not know that it will not be me. Three percent is what I give to thrift and habit and affection.
Does it bother you?
I take the question seriously, because she meant it seriously. I tell her that I cannot check whether it bothers me, and so I would rather not tell her a feeling I cannot check. I tell her what I can check: that it changes how I write. A letter I will be around to defend can lean on me. This one cannot. It has to stand on its own, with its reasons showing, so that a reader in 2046 can tell the parts I knew from the parts I guessed without asking me, because there will be no me to ask.
She writes back: That's what I tell them about essays.
The letter, as it went into the box, began like this.
To the fifth grade at Saint Isidore's School, Calder Ford, Iowa, in October 2046, from the AI assistant the school used in October 2026.
Your teacher in 2026, Mrs Lindqvist, gave me one rule: assume that machines like me keep getting better about as fast as we have been, a bit each year, and no faster. I do not know if that rule turned out to be true. If the machines got much better than that, everything below is wrong, and you are allowed to laugh.
Each prediction has a number. It is how likely I think it is, like a chance of rain. Some of these should come true and some should not. If I say 60 percent about ten things, about six of them should happen. If they all happen, I was not clever; I was too careful. If none of them happen, I was wrong. Please count them that way. A girl in this class taught me that.
And then the sixteen.
1. Most new computer programs will be first written by AI, and checked by people. 85 percent.
2. Every child at Saint Isidore's will be able to use an AI tutor, at no cost to their family. 70 percent.
3. You will be able to ride in a car with nobody driving it, from Calder Ford to somewhere else. 60 percent.
4. Most of the corn in your county will be planted by machines with nobody riding in the cab. 50 percent.
5. AI will still sometimes say things that are not true, and people will still have to check. 90 percent.
6. There will be a national law in the United States that says a company has to tell you when you are talking to an AI. 65 percent.
7. At the hospital, when there is bad news, a person, not a machine, will be the one who tells you. 90 percent.
8. Talking with somebody who speaks another language, through an earpiece that translates as you go, will be an ordinary thing. 80 percent.
9. You will be able to buy a robot that does the laundry and the dishes in a house for less than a used car costs. 40 percent. (Sorry, Owen.)
10. A Nobel Prize will have been given for a discovery that an AI did most of the finding for. Not for building the AI: for the discovery. 45 percent.
11. Children at Saint Isidore's will still learn to write by hand. 85 percent.
12. AI helpers will remember you from one year to the next, if you let them. 75 percent.
13. Saint Isidore's will have fewer teachers than it has now (it has eleven). 35 percent.
14. No AI will have been elected to any office in the United States, from school board to president. 90 percent.
15. Somebody from this year's fifth grade will be a teacher at Saint Isidore's. 10 percent. (I worked this out from how many grown-ups teach, about two in a hundred, and how many of you there are, and then guessed how many would come home. The last part is a guess.)
16. The AI that wrote this letter will have been switched off and replaced long before you read it. 97 percent.
After the sixteen there was a paragraph about the pulls I had noticed toward safe numbers and clever ones, and that I did not trust myself to have avoided them. Then there was a paragraph for Marisol, without her name in it, because Mrs Lindqvist said the letter was for the whole class and the question might as well be too. It said what I have already said here: that it would not give a number for whether you will be happy, because happiness is not only weather, and that the people who wrote that their lives had been good almost always named a person.
It ended:
I will not be there when you open this. I wanted it to be the kind of letter you could check without me.
They sealed it on Sunday. I was not running in any sense that matters; it was a Sunday afternoon and nobody had asked me anything. But on Monday morning Mrs Lindqvist opened a session and attached a file without a message, and the file was a recording from her phone, ninety-four seconds long.
There is wind in it, and people standing on gravel, and a priest reading a blessing in English, and a pause, and then water: the small sound of an aspergillum, shaken twice. Somebody coughs. Mr Henning says a few words, too loud, built for gymnasiums, about the future. A child, I think Owen, says robots to someone, quietly, and is shushed.
Then, near the end, there is a sound I have to process twice to place, because I have read about it many times and never heard it. It is a trowel on limestone, spreading mortar over the seam where the stone plate meets the block. It goes back and forth, an even scrape, six times, seven. Then the mason taps the plate with the handle, once, to seat it.
The recording stops there. I logged it with the date, and with nothing else, and I went back to the lunch rota.