Have you tried getting a job lately? It’s a tough row to hoe, believe me. There is no interaction with a ‘real’ person anymore. You jump online, upload or, if you have oodles of time before you get your rejection letter, input all the data manually into a form for the job you want and the submit button. A day or two later you get the ‘we are going another direction’ email and move on. I’ve been getting calls by AI bots on my phone, vetting me with questions. I get it, times are hard, HR has no time to go through ten thousand applicants to find the best one. At best they use the bots to get that number down to the top three, at worst, they don’t utilize any filtering at all; zombie jobs are a thing. See? I can bring about any subject back to the undead…

Who started this? I put the blame on Human Resources. Oh, sure it’s not their fault. The CEO comes to you to cut expenses, how can you do that? Well a salesperson offers you a product to help, AI parsing of candidate resumes. That goes well, you get some good candidates with it, but then the CEO wants more cuts. Phase II is AI bots doing more than parsing, but actually asking questions, saying things like, “Give me an elevator pitch with the top three reasons you are the qualified candidate for this position.” Neat, see how that can be used across the board, for any job? Rinse, repeat and soon your entire HR department is down to the HR Director and their one assistant who knows how to set up the AI you’re leasing from the vendor who rented it to you. Then what? Other departments see the encroachment of AI too, some jobs cannot (yet) be replaced, AI isn’t going to clean the toilets or even drive the tractor-trailer to the warehouse or store with your goods, again, yet. We’ll get there and this is part of the growing pains as we come to the cashless society. There will be many eggs broken as we move away from capitalism, the last ones will be breaking the ‘houses’ that have managed to accumulate all the money. The war is over, the communists won using computers to do all the work. That’s the headline and byline I expect to see on the last physical copy of the New York Times that gets printed.