Operating a car crusher seems like it would be satisfying. Any activity that goes with the flow of increasing entropy would be a nice change. Most human endeavor feels Sisypheanly futile.
Tag Archives: Career
PROMPT: Technology
Like everyone who has taken to using AI, I’m training my replacement. So, that’s always an awkward time.
PROMPT: For a Day
Any successful standup comic. To gain a practical understanding of the downside and the struggle.
I wouldn’t care to be a billionaire because it would be just my luck that it’d be the day people wised up and the revolt began, and I could say the same thing with respect to world leaders.
PROMPT: Dream Job
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
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: Three Jobs
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: Career Plan
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
“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.
PROMPT: Job
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
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.)
