This story was hard to write.
Well, okay, the story was a lot easier to write after I ended up working in person in San Francisco for a week and after I had a long conversation with Corey Quinn about why things are the way they are.
Either way, this story was hard to write because of the way you have to balance these things very carefully. If you make a satire story like this, you have to be very careful to balance it between plausibility and comedy. If you falter to one side, it’s too realistic and depressing. If you falter to the other side, it’s just an extended stand-up comedy routine and you don’t get the message you’re going after. I think I got the balance right. An earlier draft of it emphasized the “oh god this is a robot isn’t it” a bit more and I don’t think that made it good to read. Generally when you’re making creative works, you know you’re done when you can’t cut anything else away without affecting the bones of the story. I think I got to that point in editing.
One of my biggest inspirations for this story was that one Cloudflare layoff call of the woman who joined Cloudflare in a sales role (https://www.tiktok.com/@brittanypeachhh/video/73230040850436...) right between two major holidays (thanksgiving and christmas). I wanted to take it a step further. What would it be like if an AI did the layoff call for the company? Layoff calls are super taxing to the human psyche afterall, especially in the US where there’s this subtext of “and we’re taking your health insurance coverage with it”.
I did try to make it turn out well for James, the severance package is ridiculously good for the employee in comparison to what you’d probably get on the market today (I think it’d be something like 1.5 years of pay?). Originally the story was gonna end with a little bit like:
> James later attempted to appeal his termination in arbitration due to the legally binding promise the bot had made. It was unsuccessful. James’ use of “prompt injection” proved that James was aware he was talking to an AI system, and thus the bot was therefore not capable of making legally binding promises on behalf of Techaro. James was ordered to pay legal costs and financial damages to Techaro for reputational harm. James was marked as “not eligible for re-hire” in Techaro’s HR system and his severance offer was revoked. > > James later moved to a farm in the countryside and never used a computer again. He was happy.
Or something, but I think that this could actually be its own story a lot better than it could be as a footnote to an existing story. Maybe the arbitration case could be good surrealism fodder. What if the AI gets called to the stand? Absolute hilarity.
I think the next satire story about AI is going to involve an astute observation that a friend of mine made: for some reason people haven’t figured out that people just want a sandbox where you interact with NPC characters. With one glaring exception: japanese VR erotica games. I’ve wanted to try writing something a bit…more mature, and this may be the concept that I use for it.
The ideas I’m working with are VR erotica, mind uploading (how else would you get AGI on the cheap), something written from the perspective of an AI agent that doesn’t realize they are an AI agent, and this one word in Czech that is the reason we have the term “robot”. We have that word because of the play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) adapting the word “robota”, which means forced labour of the kind that serfs had to perform on their masters’ lands.
So, the main character is actually a fully sapient NPC in a VR erotica game that thinks they’re the protagonist in a game where they’re actually there to make the players happy. This concept is probably going to require a fair bit of development to avoid making it too adult because I do have a number of non-adult readers, to my horror.
Might just make it patron-only. I don’t know. Still need to noodle things out.