They sell me AI to clear my head. I would have preferred cleaner nails.

Which is more important — thought substitutes or manual labor replacements?

Photo by Elevate on Unsplash

I work as a stamping associate in a car parts manufacturing factory where I stand for eight hours a day collecting (flipping and arranging) metal parts stamped out of giant presses and passing it over to another associate or carrying and stacking metal loads handed over to me to bins nearby.

Because there isn’t much thinking to do, I compensate by looking at my dirty nails, feeling my reddened palms, heavy legs and sore body and wonder why people still have to do works as I do — mechanical, dirty, repetitive, and physical — which seems to be cut out for machines.

But I think about my apartment rent, my grocery bills, and the rejection emails from writing jobs, and thank the states of the world for still having work for an unskilled person like me. If we only had jobs that demand qualifications through certificates I would be doing something worse than stamping.

That’s a personal reason which doesn’t take away my curiosity on why people still have to do works like I do which seems to be cut out for machines. My curiosity intensifies when I come home and read about big American companies creating robots to do works I like to…