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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:
2036: a last ditch effort to save cities from becoming so geographically dispersed by private equity's monopolizaton of real estate - modest vacancy taxes go into effect nationwide. The long shadow of the AI bubble leaves a tamed, commodified, "domain-tuned intelligence on demand" service archipelago. Intelligence/cost gradients are steep, the kind of prodigiously looped generation required for domain-general moderate intelligence is firmly accounted for. Humanoid robotics flounders as the demand never existed: industrial and commercial robots are purpose-shaped, and animatronic faces are all that's needed for customer service.
A renewed flood of automated job applications picks up. The profit floor of dropship labor dried up with the bubble, nobody can make a dollar renting a fleet of bots to work at Wendy's for them, so it wasn't clear why a sparse bot flow with a much lower wage minimum would be returning now.
Your new coworker is a little off. All the gig droids are, but generally they remember your name, and take a few rounds of joke prompting to lock down for token preservation. This one quits earlier, never applies for the station upgrade, there's no way it can be worth it to run it.
You follow it home. It rides the elevator up the vacant apartment building, to its empty apartment building, to plug in to charge for the night. The vacancy tax was priced in. The slimmest margin kept to make it profitable to simulate the life of a minimally legally permissible service android worker to avoid the tax while eliminating the remaining friction from human-to-human sale. Microvacancy taxes return the profit balance to equity buys.
The last people from strip mall country dry up and blow away, the urban sprawl bombed to pieces by food deserts, information deserts, desertified to dust by whatever could push the straw deeper. No parade, just the last grim percent too far. And the harness shuts down when there's nobody left to watch for the cron task.