All In the Name of Progress

I was never really 100% sure of where this would go... but it feels tied to our current issues with AI and automation and how that affects the common worker.

Jimmy slumped against the bar, leaning into the burn of his third bourbon, begging the truth to be a lie just this one time. He didn’t know how he was going to go home and face his wife. He didn’t know how to tell her their world was ending.

The factory wasn’t closed. Far from it, business was better than ever. This wasn’t a Springsteen song about outsourced jobs and broken homes. Now, the jobs stayed in house… the workers just had wires and gears instead of hearts and minds. Sure, a couple of guys ran the floor, freshly minted with advanced certifications and no concept of working the line.

On the other hand, Jimmy, like so many others, had been reassigned to one of the new positions. These included holding up battered bar tops, waiting in line at the unemployment office, and sleeping in waterlogged boxes. Duties, more often than not, included sucking down cigarette smoke and whiskey. To get ahead, it usually required either the barrel of a .38 snub nose, a dirty razor blade, or a bottle of pills.

Jimmy cracked an anguish-filled smile. Ruefully, he thought about stories of the end of the world. They always had some army of aliens or machines destroying civilization and leaving a burned-out husk and a few charred corpses. But Jimmy was staring Armageddon in the face. It was all manner of euphemism – efficiency, streamlining, progress – that sounded more and more to him like a pink slip, a stiff drink, and no worthwhile future.

Jimmy drained the last of the bottom shelf whiskey from his glass, lit a cigarette, and decided that it was, maybe, time for a promotion.