Category Archives: jobs

PROMPT: Dream Job

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Daily writing prompt
What’s your dream job?
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I’m afraid I’d be damn near unemployable in the world of dreams. If I’m not running from something or falling down, my teeth are falling out. (I certainly couldn’t get anyone to provide decent dental coverage in dream world, and I’d be suspected of Meth addiction.) Unlike the real world, in which I’m hyper-punctual, in dreams I’m always late and I often go out of doors to find myself on the other side of the world. Besides, in dreams I’m usually not lucid more than once a month, at best.

PROMPT: Alternative Career Path

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What alternative career paths have you considered or are interested in?

At this point, it would need to be something AI / robots won’t possibly be able to do better, faster, cheaper in the near term. This leaves jobs for which one’s humanity is a central part of the job. Unfortunately, I suck at many aspects of being a human. Maybe I’ll become a robot and beat them at their own game.

PROMPT: Hard Work

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In what ways does hard work make you feel fulfilled?
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Hard work makes me feel full of aches and filled with pain. So full. So filled.

PROMPT: Three Jobs

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List three jobs you’d consider pursuing if money didn’t matter.

Well, I just read Shoji Morimoto’s Rental Person Who Does Nothing, about a job of the same name, and that sounds like a sweet gig. Sorcerer sounds like an exciting career path. Finally, cowbell and tambourine guy sounds great for someone who has no musical talent but who would like to be in a rock-n-roll band.

To recap: 1.) Rental Person Who Does Nothing; 2.) Sorcerer; 3.) Cowbell / Tambourine artist in a rock-n-roll band.

PROMPT: Profession

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What profession do you admire most and why?
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Nurse. I think it takes a tremendous level of humility and compassion. Also, I suspect it may be among the last handful of human jobs (as we know them now) to still exist once AI-robots start doing pretty much all productive tasks better, faster, and more efficiently than humans. I think long after our doctors are machines, we will have human nurses.

PROMPT: Career Plan

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What is your career plan?
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Hah. That ship has sailed. But I could say that it’s to still have something to offer when machines / AI can do all productive tasks better and / or faster than humans — i.e. to be able to convey something of the art of being human. Even though, I suspect, I won’t be around to see that day, it will be catastrophic to the species if people don’t figure these things out in advance — i.e. if we don’t figure out human roles and purpose in a post-human industrial landscape.

PROMPT: Job… for a day

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What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?
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“Maker of pies” leaps to mind, but then it occurs to me that any baker who worked at it for just a day would be the worst. It seems to me that any job that is interesting would be one that a person would be terrible at if that person did it for only a day. Conversely, any job one could successfully do for just one day would be tedious and unrewarding.

The Oldest & the Last [Free Verse]

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Kipling called prostitution 
   The world's oldest profession.

Now, I'm pretty sure that it
    Will be the last, as well:

The last professional endeavor --
    The last profitable activity --
    That humans do better than
        Machines. 

Whores will be the last holdouts 
   To shift from being workers 
      To being Artists of Humanity. . .
       Or - maybe - they will be 
       The first in that, as well.

PROMPT: Job

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What job would you do for free?
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To pick nits, I think the defining characteristic of a job is that one earns money for one’s time and effort. Otherwise, it’s volunteering or a hobby — both of which are fine activities in which I’ve participated over the years — but they’re not “jobs.” In the case of a hobby, one should do it because one loves it and / or gains from it. In the case of volunteering, if you’re doing the work only because you love the activity, you’ve probably missed the point of the undertaking.

PROMPT: Five

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When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
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I think that would have been “race car driver,” between my “cowboy” and “independently-wealthy-masked-vigilante” phases. (I did NOT know how jobs worked.)