I was just laid off by an AI.

It sounds a bit like an exaggeration, but it’s really not. And heck, I probably signed some document somewhere that says I should not be writing about this, so I’ll do my best to just avoid telling you the name of my (former) employer.

Thing is, I spent a couple months on one of those AI training platforms. I submitted a resume, I passed a couple online tests, and I waited. Nearly a year went by and suddenly, there I was, hired into this weird gamified platform where I could log in and do little tasks all day long and, yeah, make money.

I earned a couple grand during the months I focused on the work. And it really was gig work, on my own schedule, tho never talking to anyone or hearing feedback that wasn’t anonymous numbers or even really getting a sense of who was at the other end of the communications that routinely appeared in my inbox…

But it gradually sunk in that my boss was almost certainly an algorithm.

Shit, it sounds like science fiction to write that I was working of robot, but it’s true enough.

The problems, of course, were ample. And they got progressively worse. Consider all the frustrations one has when dealing with, say, a customer service bot online and then magnify it to an employment situation: time tracking, finger wagging nudges from a computer about performance standards, asking to take a week off for a trip, venting frustrations about the types of assignments that were showing up in my queue. It goes on. It was literally arguing with a machine programmed to seem caring while not actually giving a single fuck about my struggles and gripes.

For no clear reason an email arrived the other night, in the middle of the night, saying that I had been removed from the project. No explanation just: Thank you for your work, have a nice life.

I used to manage people and I stopped because occasionally shutting off my humanity to do what needed to get done damn near broke me. I guess someone thought this might be the solution.