AI Is Here, What Now

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What’s the fucking point?

I am fifty-one, a broke Bengali living alone in Calcutta, unable to sleep despite the soporifics, and my bank balance has dipped below fifty rupees. I keep thinking about AI. Then the money. Then AI again. My mind has decided that tonight would be a good night to examine my future prospects, having apparently found the present insufficiently disgusting.

Below fifty rupees. I want to leave that there for a moment. All the qualifications can stand around it and look.

All those anally retentive years in English-medium schools and colleges. The preparation. The discipline. The endless tightening of oneself into somebody who would eventually be acceptable. Speak properly. Write properly. Know the answer. Show your working. Get the marks. Get into the right institution. Don’t waste your abilities. Don’t waste your time. Time was always being wasted somewhere, and some miserable little invigilator took up permanent residence inside my head to make sure I knew it.

Four years of computer science at Jadavpur University.

Then America. A master’s at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Then the whole shebang, the gangbang, the bullshit career, the years of trying to be useful in increasingly complicated ways. Code, statistics, databases, healthcare systems, information dragged out of one obstinate arrangement and persuaded to make sense inside another. Things that required learning. Things that required attention. Years in which I was a person who did things, who knew things, who could be given a difficult problem and work through it.

And now I cannot make ends meet.

I know how that sounds. People say it all the time. Ends meet. Two small polite words for the month opening its mouth and finding you still inside it. Rent, food, medicine, the ordinary business of remaining a person in a room. I keep doing the arithmetic as though it were possible that the last calculation was unnecessarily pessimistic.

What the fuck did I do all that for?

I am supposed to say that education has intrinsic value. It does. I know it does. I have enough education to give a reasonably persuasive account of its intrinsic value while being unable to buy things with it. I can explain the distinction between knowledge and income. I can explain why a degree was never a guarantee. I can explain practically every qualification somebody might wish to insert into my complaint.

I would like, for once, to be allowed to finish the complaint.

I did not think the fucking universe owed me a throne. I thought that after all that schooling, all that studying, all that learning to do difficult things, I might be able to support myself. That was the enormous entitlement. Food. Rent. Some money left after paying for the continued operation of my body. A little room in the mind for something besides the next expense.

And now AI is here.

No, it did not make me unemployed. I was already in this predicament. My life had managed a considerable amount of fucking up without artificial assistance. I am talking about what happens next, about trying to find a way back while AI crowds into the possibilities I am still trying to examine, adding competition, noise, the threat of displacement, another layer of uncertainty over work I was already struggling to obtain.

I am already getting fucked. I lie here with my sore anus and my respectable education, wondering whether the next round will be faster, cheaper, available around the clock, and accompanied by a beautifully written explanation of how this is empowering me.

There. That is the anxiety. It is vulgar because the experience feels vulgar. Putting it into a nicer sentence does not improve what is happening at my end of the sentence.

I know the tools are useful. I use them. I can watch one do something impressive and feel the old interest wake up, the curiosity that used to be able to occupy my head without immediately having to justify its accommodation. Then, almost before I have enjoyed it, I start calculating. Can I use this to earn? Who would pay? Why would they pay me? How many other people can now produce something similar? How much work would it take to get anyone to look?

I miss being interested in something without immediately trying to sell the interest.

It makes everything grubby. A new idea comes in and I start frisking it for money. There might be a business in this. There might be a service. There might be a small piece of work, some neglected corner I could get into before everybody else arrives with the same machine and the same fucking discovery.

And then I am tired before I have properly begun.

A tool can help me write a proposal. It can help the next man write one too. It can help him write ten. I can write twenty. We can all stand there with our excellent proposals, our immaculate introductions, our persuasive little statements of value, trying to make ourselves audible over an increasingly elaborate noise that we are also helping to produce.

I am in that noise. I cannot stand outside it and congratulate myself on having diagnosed it. I need to get somebody’s attention. I need to explain that I can do something useful. I need to find a way of saying it that does not sound like the other explanations, including the one I wrote yesterday and now dislike because I can hear the same smooth, confident, frictionless voice in it.

Everything sounds employable. I remain unemployed.

And the work itself, yes, I know there is still work a machine cannot simply be left to do. I know about checking, judgment, context, responsibility. I have worked with healthcare data. A convincing answer and a correct answer can be far enough apart to cause trouble. There is still a use for someone who understands what he is looking at.

But I have to find the person who needs that use and persuade them to pay me for it. I have to reach them through all this noise. If they decide they can manage with fewer people, I have to be one of those fewer people. There is no comfort in being told that human judgment remains necessary when I cannot find anyone willing to purchase mine.

The machine does not have to swallow the entire profession. I worry about the particular bit of room I might have squeezed into. The little contract. The modest job. The work beneath the grand announcements, the work that might have let me breathe for a few months.

That is where my mind goes. It does not need to abolish employment across the planet to keep me awake. It only has to make me doubt the next possible opening.

Then comes the advice.

Upskill.

I would like to take that word somewhere private and beat the shit out of it.

I have been upskilling for most of my life. A considerable portion of my life has been spent becoming qualified for a later portion of my life in which I would supposedly be allowed to live. First this examination, then that degree, then this language, that system, another thing to understand, another deficiency to repair. I kept moving the permission forward. There was always something else I ought to know before I could feel reasonably safe.

Now I am fifty-one and being told, once again, to prepare.

Prepare for what, exactly? How long does the preparation last? When do I get to use the life I have been preparing for?

There are free courses. Yes. I know. There are tools, opportunities, niches, entire territories of possibility that someone who has already eaten can describe at length. I can describe them too. I can sit here and produce sensible advice while my own attention keeps breaking off to worry about money.

Even when the course is free, I have to remain alive while learning it. Even when the tool is free, somebody has to want what I make. Even when the idea is good, I have to get it to work before the money runs out, which is a particularly amusing requirement when the money has effectively already run out.

I am tired of having to explain this without sounding negative.

Negative. God forbid I should introduce an unpleasant note into the proceedings. The future is being unveiled. There are lights. There are gradients. There is a man explaining that this changes everything, and I am expected to sit up and receive the news like a fresh opportunity instead of another fucking thing I have to catch up with.

The surfaces are so polished now. The websites, the profiles, the photographs, the language. Every failure arrives retrospectively groomed into a lesson. Every difficulty has had its hair done before being admitted to the story. People announce resilience in sentences that have never apparently had to lie awake wondering how to ask for help again.

I know a profile is a selection. I know people conceal things. Knowing that does very little for me when I am looking at the screen at this hour.

Because there is my face.

My ugly old face in the darkened glass between one bright thing and another. Tired, looking back. I turn the screen on and everyone is becoming something. I let it go dark and there I am, still trying to make sense of what became of me.

I feel embarrassed by the face. Embarrassed by the balance. Embarrassed that I am embarrassed, because surely at my age I ought to have developed some grand philosophical immunity to the world’s judgments. Another qualification missing. Another little course I should have completed before arriving here.

And under all of it, the old school training continues. Straighten the sentence. Remove the bitterness. Make yourself presentable. Nobody wants to hire somebody who sounds like this. Smile a little. Sound current. Sound energetic. Don’t let them hear how tired you are. Don’t mention the money too soon. Explain the gap. Explain yourself.

I have spent so much time explaining myself that sometimes I can barely stand the sound of my own account.

Here is what I studied. Here is what I did. Here is what I can still do. Please look past the years that have gone wrong. Please do not make me compress the whole fucking thing into a cheerful paragraph about my journey.

Journey. There is another word I would like to drag out behind the building.

I want to swear without making the swearing decorative. I want to say that this has hurt, that years of it have hurt, that I cannot always convert the hurt into something useful or instructive or pleasant to read. Sometimes it sits there and makes the next small task feel heavier than it should. Sometimes I open something I need to work on and can already hear the demand that I make another effort, followed by another, with no idea whether any of them will turn into money.

I still try. That is part of why I am so fucking tired.

There is always enough hope left to make me look at another possibility. Enough to reopen the page. Enough to think perhaps this particular thing, if I could finish it, explain it properly, put it in front of the right person. Then I have to supply the effort out of whatever is left of me, and the hoping itself takes something too.

I would like the people selling optimism to include that in the cost.

I am tired of the performance of being someone who is nearly all right. Of polishing the language until the difficulty disappears from view. Of sounding like a plausible employee while sitting here frightened about ordinary expenses. Of being told to discover my value when what I need is somebody to agree to a price and actually pay it.

I am tired of catching myself looking at my education with resentment. I loved knowing things. I still do, in fits, when the worry loosens its grip for a little while. I hate that I have begun asking those years to defend themselves. Jadavpur, UTSA, the work, all of it lined up before this absurd little balance as though the bank app were qualified to pass judgment on an entire life.

And I let it. Tonight I let it.

Below fifty rupees, and suddenly every decision wants reviewing. Every turn in the road. Every chance I might have missed. There must have been a point at which I could have prevented this. I go looking for it, as though finding the exact wrong turn would put me back there with enough time to take the other one.

Meanwhile the actual future keeps arriving, crowded with machines and announcements and strangers who seem able to turn all this change into something they can live on.

I cannot tell how much harder AI will make things for me. I am frightened that it will. I am frightened that while I am still trying to recover enough ground to stand on, the work I could reach will be repriced, reorganized, drowned in competing offers, or simply gone. I am frightened that I will spend another year preparing to become necessary.

I am so very, very tired.

The soporifics have not put me to sleep. The fan is still going. I put the phone down, then pick it up again, as though I might have missed something that would let me stop worrying.

AI is here. What now.

The screen goes dark. My face again.

All those years. I keep coming back to all those years.