by Wrench in the Gears
January 7, 2018
January 7, 2018
This is the second of a
seven-part series that outlines a potential future where online education is
surveilled by authoritarian interests, and strivers, like Talia and her
daughters, attempt to secure a precarious living within the constraints of
oppressive “Smart” City policies. The introduction to the series and Part
One: Plugging In can be read here.
Part 2: A World Without (Much)
Work
As the Fourth Industrial
Revolution got underway, automation wiped out more and more jobs. The
disappearance of industrial work was grudgingly accepted. Then self-driving
vehicles replaced truckers, bus drivers, delivery people, and car services. Even
so, many were taken aback when digitization came for the service sector. As
Artificial Intelligence hit its stride, teachers, nurses, therapists,
paralegals, actuaries, financial advisors, film editors all found themselves
cast aside, scrambling for new careers. It seemed everyone who could work
switched to coding and cyber security. The threat posed by hacks to the vast
Internet of Things had spiraled out of control, and they needed more and more
people to build and maintain the simulations.
After tech and energy, the
entertainment sector experienced some of the biggest growth from the shift to
digital life. Talia supplements the family’s meager digital stipend working as
a Mechanical Turk. She picks up gigs, small jobs, coding bits of virtual worlds
when people go off the scripts prepared by the Entertainment Software Group.
Having a background in art gives her an advantage. Talia’s high creativity
ratings keep her near the top of the MicroWork platform where freelancers
compete for short-term or even micro employment.
These days, though, it’s
getting more and more difficult to earn hard digital credit. Many posted gigs
are now issuing payment in skill points that can boost a person’s citizen score
but can’t be exchanged for durable goods or used to pay down debt. If things
don’t let up soon she’ll be forced to figure out some other way to meet monthly
expenses that often exceed what’s deposited to their Global Coin account.
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