When Robots Steal Our Jobs, Will Humans Work for Free?
Terminator 2120: Rise of The Work Gym
On a Monday in the not-too-distant future, you wake up at no particular time, and just as you think, I need a coffee—one materializes on the end table next to your bed.
Sweet.
Eager to see what the day has in store, you check your Calendar:
Another case of The Mondays, it would seem; just like The Tuesdays, The Wednesdays, The Thursdays, The Fridays, The Saturdays, and The Sundays…
Your day-to-day life — as well as the lives of everyone around you — is an endless stretch of 24/7 leisure time, interspersed with meals and attempts to have sex (your robot butler handles the former, though its assistance with the latter is frowned upon by society).
As you debate whether you should shower today or next week, a feeling stirs deep within you, cutting through your normal sense of same; you feel the opposite of good, almost as if you’re…
…slightly uncomfortable?
You glance into your smart mirror and are momentarily disturbed to see your sagging reflection staring back at you, then relieved as it automatically adds a six-pack filter.
That’s it! I really need to go to the—
Your robot butler, sensing your thoughts, interjects: “There’s still an hour left to get to the gym, you lazy POS.”
MileyRayCyborg speaks truth; you’ve been on vacation, and it’s time to put in some work. But not at the regular gym.
One of the main benefits of the work gym you attend—40 Hour Fitness—is their full-time schedule. And yet, despite its convenience, most members just end up calling out most days of the week.
But not you. You’re a work rat.
You scan your closet for gym clothes and settle on a wrinkle-free dress shirt and stretch khakis; they’re made by Lululemon, the most popular (and expensive) workletic apparel brand. Heading out the door, you consider lacing up your Jordan SalesForce 1's, before slipping on a pair of slides instead.
It is, after all, casual Monday.
Someday (if it hasn’t already) a Robot Will Steal Your Job (more efficiently than a human thief).
Not sure about that? Watch this terrifying video of a robot doing parkour. I’ll wait.
Sufficiently terrified? Great. You should be.
As AI advances rapidly accelerate, jobs that were traditionally thought robot-proof (such as writing and engineering) are at risk of disappearing over the next few decades.
Even now, as I write this article, GPT-3 is practicing its marketing copy and threatening to put people like me out of a dream job that was meant to replace a day job that robots have already likely made obsolete.
The writing on the wall (likely Javascript) is clear: if it hasn’t already, a robot will someday do your job. And probably better.
“I’m sick and tired of all these goddamn robots stealing all our jobs!” — Elon Musk, circa 2063.
While I have serious reservations about the success of the current worldwide trend towards marxism vis a vis violent revolution, it’s hard not to imagine that we won’t someday need to embrace a more socialist model, assuming technological advancements reach their logical conclusion.
At some point, we are simply not going to need to work to survive, which begs the question:
…just what the hell are we going to do with our time when there’s no real need to go to work anymore?
I submit to you that work, like exercise, is a biological drive, deeply imprinted in our primal self. What happens when that drive still exists but no longer serves a purpose?
Turns out we already have a modern-day analog: the gym.
Why Are Gyms a Thing?
Make the mistake of glancing up from your elliptical machine and you will be confronted with a tragic paradox: a room full of sweaty people working as hard as they can for no discernible purpose. I’ve often observed the squinty-eyed, determined masses at the gym, churning away at an endless loop of rubber treads, and thought, if we could just hook all these people up to an electric hamster wheel, we could power the entire country!
There are no gyms in hunter-gatherer societies. Likewise, there are few construction workers with gym memberships; those are reserved for the people whose jobs have moved them away from the streets and into an office chair.
After hours of in-depth research on Wikipedia, I was able to determine that the first modern-day gyms (excluding the Roman bathhouses (which I’m not sure were used entirely for getting a good pump on (or were they?))) made an appearance in Europe and America in the mid-1800s, which coincided neatly with the industrial revolution that was taking place throughout the region. As technological advancements shifted hand production to machines, people moved from agricultural jobs into factories, and manual outdoor labor was made obsolete for the majority of the industrialized world.
In the absence of a need to work, gyms emerged to fill a void; exercise, as we know it, is a relic of our past; a yearning from a latent drive driven to extinction, but still buried in our personal fossil record.
And also we do it to get laid (see: Roman bathhouses).
So it stands to reason that should AI take away our jobs, humans will still seek to work for two reasons (in reverse order of importance):
- to fulfill the inherent desire for meaningful effort, and
- to impress the opposite sex.
But how will we fulfill these desires, when we no longer have a justifiable need for doing so?
The answer is, of course, to crush out a set of important work emails, even if we don’t really need to, bruh.
Terminator 2120: Rise of the Work Gyms
Have you ever had the urge to clock into work on your day off…just for the pleasure of it?
In the future, you will. You won't even get paid.
Arriving at your work gym, you’re greeted by Bob, your Personal Boss. “Sup, bruh? Do you have those reports we talked about?” Hearing his grating voice makes you cringe every time. Bob is an idiot. But you’re not paying him for his smarts; a good Personal Boss usually has low intelligence, but high delegation abilities. “I’m running a little late on those.”
Bob sighs, feigning disappointment. “I’ll have them on your desk by tomorrow. But first, I’m gonna get some reps in.”
You with some light cardio at the HIIT station, which is essentially a series of cubicles crammed next to one another, with progressing stages of work projects at each. Designed to mimic a real job environment, most of the stations are for doing mindless busywork (filing supposedly important papers; drafting new company policies and procedures; sending out customer satisfaction follow-up emails). Like most, you’ve found that if you eliminate the busywork stations, you can get most of your actual work done within a two- to three-hour shift. You pretend to be busy for fifteen minutes before moving on to the heavy lifting.
In the center of the gym is a glass-walled conference room, wherein executives (members who complete the full eight-hour shift, five or more days week) go over important expense reports and stockholder decisions. On the wall is a leaderboard, which publicly highlights all of the current employee promotions and demotions.
This is where you’ll do the bulk of your work today. But not yet. First, you swing by the water cooler. If you’re going to work late, you’ll need to stay hydrated, you reason.
“Did you hear about Tom in marketing?” Amy is your Work Gym Wife. “He got let go.”
If one misses too many consecutive workouts (without calling in sick in advance), it’s possible to have your membership fired. “Yea, he told me about it last week. He’s at the Unemployment Gym down the street now. They assigned him eight hours of couch work, so he’ll be down for a while.”
Amy smiles. Though you’d never admit it to her, she’s the main reason you come into work at all.
Fidgeting nervously, you decide to go for it. “What are you doing after work today?”
“Oh, just going to the exercise gym, I suppose,” she replies.
“You don’t say! I’m going too.” You smile at Amy as you marvel at all the future has to offer the two of you. “Maybe we could grab a bite to eat at the food gym after?”
