Humans Need Not Apply
During the enforced hibernation of the Covid Plague, Techno Tom and his wife took in their son and his wife plus their two kids. No big deal considering Tom and Rachel’s house here across the road from us was a two story, 4 bedroom, 3 bath Cape Cod with a 3 car garage and another for the 40 foot travel trailer that rarely left its shelter. Tom and Rachel didn’t mind the return of their prodigal son, but Jason and his wife Marie viewed this as a personal catastrophe, lost job, their own house underwater, the kids forced to uproot and attend school here in the boondocks, just paupers accepting the charity of parents who they figured might have other plans for their Golden Years than an empty nest filled back up.
Jason, once the quarantines lifted, enrolled in a Coding Boot Camp, something Tom explained to us techie imbeciles that had something to do with creating software programs. Good paying jobs, he said, and sure enough, Jason was hired at a start-up in Seattle and after a couple of years in South End purgatory, made his family’s escape. Tom and Rachel fronted the kids partial down payment on a modest house in the city, the children enrolled in new schools — again — and the future looked rosy. Again.
Until this week when Techno joined our table at the Pilot House, not with his usual beer but a double shot of scotch on the rocks. ‘Wuzzup?’, one of us finally got up the courage to ask after 5 minutes of silent and serious drinking until the tension proved too much to wait on Tom to break the dismal mood.
“My kid,’ he moaned. ‘They laid him off yesterday. Said they didn’t need a coder now that AI can do the same thing ten times faster and twice as well. Plus, nobody’s hiring coders now, same damn reason. He’s screwed. What’s he gonna do now?’
Now, you have to understand, Tom’s audience were maybe not the best choice for eliciting sympathy, most of us having spent our ‘earning years’ in frivolous pursuits, odd jobs, artistic detours … and, well, just basic indolence to be honest.
But we bought the next couple of rounds, declared that the Tech Billionaires were scum, cursed AI and mumbled pathetic aphorisms like ‘when one door closes another one opens’, not altogether helpful in raising Techno’s despair. He declared the American Dream dead and finally Two Toke drove him home. I imagine pretty soon Jason will be joining us at the Pilot House where we can all give him the benefit of our collective sage counseling.
Tags: AI Apocalypse, AI Job Losses, Job Lost to AI