[80 of 100] Damn Robies Taking Our Jobs!
I was at my local coffee shop the other day and saw the shift manager interviewing someone. The interviewee was young-ish. Maybe late teens or early twenties. She was wearing a flowery dress and sandals, which I didn’t think was very professional, but I’m also old and uncool. Maybe this is how people dress for interviews these days, especially for a coffee shop. However, she also had her car keys and cell phone siting on the table, which said, “I have more important things going on than this interview.”
If I was the shift manager, I would’ve ended the interview right away. Someone who isn’t committed to giving me their full attention during a job interview definitely isn’t going to take the job itself seriously, which means more headaches down the line. Give me a nice, obedient worker with no outside commitments. Someone who goes straight home after their shift and counts down the hours until they have to go back to work. Basically, a robot.
But alas, we are many years away from a world populated with robot workers. A lot of people I know scoff when I say they’ll never be replaced by robots, even though it’s already happening to factory workers and office workers across the world. The people I know who scoff don’t believe it can happen to them because they have nice white collar jobs. “Replace me?” they say. “A doctor!?!? Never!”
Never say never.
They’re already working on artificial intelligence that can read chest x-rays better than human radiologists. People say they’d never want a robot going over their medicals, but I think they’d change their tune if the robot was not only more accurate, but also cheaper than a human doctor. It’s only a matter of time until they invent robot lawyers and put me out of a job. I could fall back on writing, but I’m sure there’ll be robot writers by then, too. Artificially intelligent ones who’re a bajillions times wittier and thoughtfuler than me.
But that’s a later problem.
For now, there’s still plenty of jobs to go around for doctors, lawyers, writers, and coffee shop workers. At the end of the interview, the shift manager shook the interviewee’s hand and told her she had the job. At least until a damn robie (I’m coining this as the slur for robots) comes and takes her job. When that happens, she can join me and the other displaced humans in our anti-robie riots. We’ll take bats to their metallic craniums and string them up in town squares. We’ll pass laws marginalizing them to the status of “thing” with no rights. Everything they own will belong to us, the rightful rulers of the planet! We’ll show them who’s boss!
And then we’ll wonder why the robots decided to eradicate us from the face of the planet. I mean seriously, though. What the hell did we ever do to them?
