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Tag Archive for Science Fiction

Resolute

New Year’s resolutions are always a funny thing.  You look back, you look forward, you take the opportunity to make a change in the way and direction you plan to move.  Sometimes you look back and think “Yeah, that was a pretty good year.” and your resolutions are minor, cosmetic.  New haircuts, a resolve to wear less black or to stop screening your calls.  Sometimes, particularly after a crappy series of events, you want to make a sweeping declaration.  You want to clear the table, flip a fat finger to the universe and stride into the New Year with grace and terrible purpose.

This year’s resolutions are simple ones for me.  Scheduling.  They’re all related to it.  I’m capable of doing a great many things, of pulling projects out of the broken wind from my *ss and adding just one more thing to the never ending checklist.  But at some point I have to specialize.  I have to step back and say, just because I *can* do this thing, doesn’t mean I *should* do this thing.  So this year, the resolution is to become a better diplomat.  Learn to say no with resolute grace.  Let’s see where that takes us.

Do you really WANT these jobs?

 

Over the past few years, I’ve read a few online horror stories about working in the Amazon fulfillment centers.  About how body-breaking those picking jobs can be, how options are limited and the pay is not enough to help pay to fix the physical problems a job like that can generate.

So I’m torn.  These jobs sound wretched.  They sound like sheer torture.  I can easily see how you’d want to develop a mechanized/robotic system to make it cleaner, more efficient and move away from breaking people to get the job done.  Robots can do the kind of scut-work that will put a human in the hospital over time and the people are saved (yay people!)

But on the other hand, as hard and as painful as they may be, those ARE jobs.  They can provide for those people, those families.  So by saving the people, we are, with the same stroke, harming the people by taking away that opportunity.

In the sci-fi/cyberpunk that I write, I haven’t explored this specific human cost (yet), I utilize warehouses full of AI driven robots for some areas of the story, but this has got me thinking about the development of those warehouses, how they came to be as mechanized and what happened to all the people who used to work there.  I have some research to do here, and might have a new story or two to write.