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The Human Toll of Waiting for AI to Take Over
More robots, please
So much time thinking about AI has changed how I see people. I notice the workers I used to overlook, doing the jobs no one wants to think about. Living in Madrid, that doesn’t mean miners or fishermen, but warehouse staff, delivery drivers, supermarket stockers, and cleaners. Like the worn landscapes of a city you’ve walked a thousand times, they fade into the background, part of the scenery. They blend in like mundane noise we drown out with premium headphones. They’re the subservient cogs in a system that feeds from them without giving back.
They’re everywhere, wheels of the world. They always were. I wasn’t looking. And that’s what unsettles me most: Not the shame of having ignored them blinded by the unspoken privilege of being a writer, but how unsurprising it feels that I did — does anyone ever think about them?
I do now. Or, at least, I do today.
I took a trip to the beach with my parents and my siblings in early December last year. It’s the best time for that: empty shores, the cold softened by the tempering effect of the sea, and a sun that won’t dare scorch my skin. On the way there — five hours from Madrid, far by Spanish standards — we passed through one of the road tollbooths that separate the capital from the rest of the Iberian Peninsula.
