(Inspired by Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better )
Welcome to the year 2035. Welcome to our city, although things are different today than when I called it my city. Like before, I still don’t own anything. If I’m being honest, I don’t know that I even own myself anymore.
This wasn’t what we wanted to happen when we started our city five years ago. We wanted a place where wealth and poverty were meaningless terms referencing a distant, darker past. It seemed to work for awhile, but something happened since then that turned our dream into… well, something else.
Everything here is still free, but nothing is worth having. People don’t worry about breaking the bicycle they’re using because they don’t own it. They just discard it and order another. This is also true with appliances, cars, buildings, clothing, and everything else. The robots and AIs that were built to repair everything they can or clean up the streets and sidewalks of what can’t be repaired have a hard time keeping up. Honestly, I don’t know why our city hasn’t just ordered more robots. But it means that I don’t like going out for walks and bike rides anymore; it’s hard to get a bike that isn’t already broken, and I’d have to walk on streets and sidewalks covered in old junk waiting to get picked up by the cleaning robots. It’s less depressing to just stay inside, but not entirely. One time I came home and the people who were using the living room while I was gone had a party or something, but I guess things got out of hand. The room was full of leftover food and other messes, and the walls were really torn up in some places. I had to clean up the room myself, and it took a week or so for the repair robots to be able to get to my order for new walls, because they were running behind.
I think another problem is there’s a lot more people in the city now than before. At first things were wonderful, but people from outside of the city started to move in. It was only natural that they wanted all the free things we enjoyed, and at first we welcomed new people. But adding new people increased the demand for things like food and appliances, but especially living space. I used to have a living room, but because the city is so crowded it’s being used as other peoples’ bedroom now, and I shouldn’t complain because it really wasn’t my living room to begin with. Things can get really awkward when one person needs to use a room for a business meeting, because it might have people sleeping in it already. Arguments and fights can happen then. Fortunately the city tore down some older houses and is building bigger and taller buildings to create efficient space for lots of people. They’re going up pretty quickly so we’re told that soon each of us will have a little more room.
Plus it might have a nice view of the building next to it.
I’ve spoken with some of the people who came from outside of the city. One of them used to be a farmer and grew some of the food we eat here. When I asked why he stopped farming and moved here he said “Why shouldn’t I? Everything you need is free here, so my whole family and I moved here after the farm was taken from me.” He explained that the city took his farm so that they could make sure we got the food we needed. I guess I can’t blame folks for wanting to move to our city because it was so great here, for a little while anyway. But it seems like it was better when there were fewer people.
There are supposed to be robots doing the farming work now, but I heard they’d begun to break down a few years ago and not enough people who knew how to fix robots wanted to leave the city anymore. People in our city couldn’t get enough food to eat all the time, so the people in charge of our city had to force the technicians go out and fix the robots and force the farmers to go out and make sure the food was growing properly. Before 2030 people could be enticed to do work by offering them money, but those days are thankfully gone. Forcing people to work against their will wasn’t what we wanted, but people need food. Fortunately the robots are mostly working again, but sometimes I’m still told that the food I want is unavailable for order. Maybe half of the people who wanted a turkey last Thanksgiving got one. I’m sure that once this emergency is over the people farming and fixing robots can come back to our city. But maybe it’s better that they don’t come back.
Another thing that’s still free is energy, but we don’t have it all the time. Some places like hospitals do, of course. But even our free and clean energy isn’t unlimited, and the machines that make our energy need maintenance. Robots were supposed to do that too, but they don’t last forever either and need repairs sometimes. To save energy, most buildings have their power cut off during the night. This can be tough in the winter, but you learn to order extra heat in the day and bundle up at night. But that overloads the grid sometimes, so power can go out in the day too. Then it’s extra cold at night. It can take awhile for the repair robots to fix the grid, especially in the winter. Our city really should have ordered more of them.
With so many people in the city now, disease is a problem. Our sewer system wasn’t designed to handle this many people, so it backs up from time to time, which makes the place smelly and unpleasant. All bathrooms and toilets are public now, of course, but most of them are really gross, so a lot of people just find places outside where they go to the bathroom, like our formerly beautiful natural spaces. Even worse, the sewers backing up can make people ill. And because nobody owns where they live you can’t isolate yourself unless you go to a hospital. But those are even more crowded than the buildings we turned into living pods. People wear cloth masks and gloves all the time to try to protect themselves from everyone else. The city tells us that’s enough to prevent infection, but people still get sick somehow. Surgical-style masks and gloves can’t be ordered because the hospitals need them more than us. You can get them from certain shady people if you really want them, but I don’t want to get in trouble so I use, wash, and reuse the cloth ones I’m allowed to have.
I had no privacy back in 2030. I know this, but it somehow feels like there’s even less privacy today. There are so many people now. Even the bedroom I’m in isn’t private, since I don’t actually own it. Anyone who needs the space is entitled to it. Right now there are four other people sleeping in the bedroom in which I live, and it can change from day to day. I’m not sure who they are, so I sleep with my mask on. And if I don’t like the room I’m sleeping in because of the other people, the city says I have to find another room to sleep in. I know it’s because I don’t own the room, but I don’t like that rule as much as I used to.
Because the streets are messy and the sewers are backed up and the power and food and appliance services aren’t working the way they used to, the people in charge of the city declared that the residents had to help out, at least for now. People who had technical skills got assigned to jobs they could help most at, but painters and artists like me don’t know how to fix power lines or farming robots, or be nurses at the hospitals. So to make it fair, everyone without a specific needed skill gets assigned a different job each month out of the jobs that need to be done but don’t take long to learn. We’ve been told this is just to solve the current emergency and that once all the worker bots are fixed then things will go back to the way they were. Hopefully the emergency will be over soon. This month I have to work cleaning up the sewers so our waste doesn’t back up into the streets. It’s disgusting and grueling work, and I don’t want to reuse my mask after a day in the sewers, and it makes me resent everyone else in the city for causing this mess. But if I don’t work hard enough the people who are assigned to monitor my progress can recommend me for reassignment, which means leaving the city and working somewhere else. I don’t know of anyone who was sent for reassignment that was allowed to come back to our city. I’d like to see our city return to what it was five years ago so I keep my head down and try hard to do enough to not get in trouble. But I can’t say I’m happy doing this. I’d much rather be painting.
Workers’ paradise.
I’ve visited this city. Moscow 1994
San Francisco, 2025?
Better have some damn good robocops. Strangers living that close together is going to result in violence.
Even better, the robocops control the surplus population!
In WEFtown, you are the surplus population.
No, you are the product on offer.
What you are for just depends on whose buying.
Life for the Eloi continues to be comfortable and pleasant. Political skills are extremely valuable.
Welcome to 2040. Everyone is dead – utopia achieved at last.
Judge Death is pleased.
Are you Firstin’? I’m Firstin’.
You could call it firstin’.
I ate way too much hot sauce yesterday.
Speaking of our glorious future, filled with groundbreaking totally unheard of never-been-tried innovations
The growing shift towards skills-based hiring will widen the talent pool, which in turn means bosses can hire someone with an untraditional or less credentialed background to do the same job for less. In simple terms, that may mean reliable entry-level jobs for college grads could “disappear” so to speak. Or that your job, regardless of level, will be given to a degreeless someone else. But what it really means is recruiting will become more democratized—an easy net positive for the entire workforce. And that you might need to sharpen your skills.
Fuller finds skills-based hiring “very valuable.” Drawing on his own research on the topic, he said when companies removed a college degree requirement from a job listing, they often then infused new language in the job description, asking for greater social skills, ability to manage, ability to reason, ability to deal with strangers, and executive functioning. (Commonly referred to as soft skills.)
“Do I think white collar work will inevitably require a college degree? Absolutely not,” he says. “It will require certain types of technical or hard skills not necessarily indicated by college.”
Whoa.
The plaintiffs’ bar sharpens it knives.
Until ChatGPT improves it’s legal drafting skills just a little.
Why? It will also be doing the arbitration and making the rulings.
I’m not seeing the required diversity statements.
/taps foot
Except it doesn’t really mean any of that. This is just legal cover for HR and hiring managers to pass over qualified candidates in favor of those who in no way meet the basic job requirements but do fill the right DEI checkboxes.
I’ve been lucky enough to sit it on rants by HR where, despite a hiring process that contains every kind of barrier to hiring whites legally permissible (including a special raked over the coals audit when a white person is hired) combined with a DEI hiring bonus incentive, the “right” kind of people still aren’t being hired at high enough rates.
This waiver of hard requirements in favor of undefined soft skills is exactly how some universities artificially keep down their acceptance rates for Asian applicants.
Yeah, the jig was up when I saw “they often then infused new language in the job description”.
It pretty much negates everything that came before it about “skills”.
Any HR person who injects themselves into hiring should be thrown off the roof.
That is not their job, not their role. Process the paperwork and shut up.
Sadly, that’s not going away. Mrs. Hobo works in healthcare and any potential hire is screened by HR before forwarded to her. Incredibly esoteric job but someone who’s never done it decides who she gets to look at or interview. Sometimes job posting to hire takes months yet the system requires results from her. Don’t get her started on them being a truncheon for the disgruntled employees and further distracting the team from their jobs. If HR went away, results in most industries would sky rocket.
The only time that would happen is when someone, the dept. manager for instance, had no desire to screen applicants in any way, whatsoever.
HR does nothing that the C-suite doesn’t want, nothing that the dept. head doesn’t want, and nothing that the elected official doesn’t want. If it seems they do, whomever is supposedly in charge is so weak and cowed as to be a force worse than a rogue HR dept. IE totally ineffective, and losing money/political capital faster than anything else. Most of that language that everyone hates comes down from Risk Management, as it is designed to help mitigate law suites. If the C-suite doesn’t want that, then it will be removed, and quickly.
Which is another thing, so many interweaving legal requirements. For instance, at the local university, grad students have unionized. They are now entitled to all the protections that this entails, which is counter to how every professor used to hire, fire, pay, promote in the past. So, now someone needs to make sure that every T is crossed and I dotted, or whomever (most likely SEIU) represents them is going to cause a strike, which will fuck any Uni as they now rely on that work force. Private company? Every applicant now has the chance to own a piece of you if you did one thing wrong. Gov’t entity? Welcome to your political overlords taking their pound of flesh, just to make the voters feel like they did something, anything.
DEI one of HR’s hobby horses? Guess what sunshine, 90% of people who graduated from college are behind this lock, stock, and barrel. In other words, this is what companies want. This is why CA gov’t is constantly trying to get past what the voters approved, no bias in hiring. This is why Trump scares the piss out of them, he negates the whole philosophy behind the upper-middle class.
Sunshine? Thank you for the kind welcome, especially calling my wife weak.
The fun part is that none of that shit is legal.
Thanks Grumbles,
We’re seeing that play out, minus the robots, in many big cities. The less crowded places can still get by with the deficit producing welfare programs. With enough money some things can get done, at least so far.
We shared that this Christmas. We had my daughter here, she works for Visiting Angels but only enough so she doesn’t lose her Medicare benefits. Many of her clients are on sort of welfare, which also pays for the Visiting Angel. One grand daughter and husband are school teachers. The other grand daughter and husband are associated with some sort of high tech monitoring of hospital patients that are mostly paid for with tax dollars. Of course Mrs F and I are on the dole as well. 7 people, all in the consuming part of society.
The producing people of the country are stretched pretty thin.
Do often wonder when that stretched rubberband snaps. Or maybe we just make a smooth descent into something like Argentina or Greece if not worse.
There will be blood.
You can’t have a hetrogenous society lacking in both prosperity and unifying cause and expect anything else. Each faction will choose its scapegoats and begin lashing out. And it will not be the tidy dipole of factions we have today, that is an artifical superstructure hiding the fractures.
The producing people of the country are stretched pretty thin.
That’s why we need to get their wages up- so they can pay more taxes.
“We do believe AI will cause more job loss, though we are surprised how quickly the technology was cited as a reason,” senior vice president Andy Challenger told Fortune. “It is incredible the speed the technology is evolving and being adapted.” Some CEOs have said AI is moving faster than real life, leaving scant hope for tech-averse workers to keep up.
AI is going to wipe out the carpenters and electricians and plumbers and backhoe operators and welders. It’s as plain as the nose on your face.
Well done, Grumbles. I thought the tone of vague bafflement and resentment combined with resignation was spot on.
Yeah, you can almost picture the face accompanying that.
Really? All I can see is the mask.
Under a boot, being stamped on forever?
“Why did you bring me to this ditch full of dead people?”
Being a Matrix battery would be a better existence.
As much as I enjoyed the movies (well, mainly the first one), the whole “batteries” thing struck me as unnecessarily stupid. There’s lots of ways to get power. A better use for the humans would have been computational capacity. Put all that underutilized wetware to work.
/pet peeve OFF
TECHNOCORE!
+ 1 Shrike
I wonder how many times I have to read that series before it makes any sense.
The only way it makes sense is if the robots’ core programming is still “Protect Humanity” and the whole battery nonsense is a lie or even legend by those who couldn’t do the math and realize that it would take far less power to lobotomize the humans than run the matrix. And that there were far more efficient ways to squeeze power out of the resources spent running the matrix and keeping the humans alive.
“if the robots’ core programming is still “Protect Humanity”
Hard to square with the periodic extermination of people not hooked up to the Matrix.
Protect the species, not individuals?
But if I don’t work hard enough the people who are assigned to monitor my progress can recommend me for reassignment, which means leaving the city and working somewhere else.
Off to Gulag!
‘Reassignment’ – Well done and where these scenarios always end in the real world. I read the original the other day and always walk away shocked at how stupid they think we are. Then I look around me and get depressed.
I didn’t realize it was from 7 years ago when someone linked it the other day.
Man, they’ve been plotting our destruction longer than I thought.
That was the point they felt comfortable being open about it.
Pulling frum tha ded thred:
Yes, tis twoo. Midnight Mass had them having a church picnic, a feast, during the fasting time of lent. Also misaligned Ordinary Time. My problem with this is, the whole series saw itself as a criticism of Catholicism, but showed it couldn’t even understand the things that are plainly laid out as written rules. Like making your grand critique of Star Wars start off with a screed on how Dilithium crystals wouldn’t work as an energy source.
The problem with any Utopia is that there is always going to be a bunch of scut work that no one wants to do. Cleaning the bathrooms, brewing and serving the coffee, etc., etc.
The system used to be that youngsters would do that work and get paid. They’d also learn how jobs work (get there on time, listen to the manager, how to put up with assholes) and be ready to get a new and better job. Now everyone wants to start at the top and not put in the hours.
Jobs are no different than any other skill. You have to put in your time before you are good at it.
With spiking minimum wages, more and more of those entry level jobs are going away. Fastfood joints are getting more and more automated. In the past few years, I have run across at least a half dozen kids who’s first job was the job out of college. They didn’t even work during college (how’s that for keeping those student loans down?). They don’t even have basic job skills. Showing up on time. Not taking 10000000 hours of “personal time” off. Not getting seniority.
But work is hard and not fun and stuff.
Flex PTO! Take as much time as you want or need!
Reminds me of hearing normies complain about the excesses of their leftist paradises but can’t see that they themselves are part of it.
Some normies are more normal than others.
The problem with any Utopia is that there is always going to be a bunch of scut work that no one wants to do. Cleaning the bathrooms, brewing and serving the coffee, etc., etc.
CoolieMorlock labor.Everybody doesn’t get to live in the beautiful city in the clouds.
Thanks for the compliments, all. Glad you enjoyed it, and it was fun to write. Figured I’d wind up busy all day. Personally, I blame the lack of AI and robots.