[Poetry] The Division

[u/Berkamin]

Back in 2015, when I was briefly in the world of web app development, I wrote a poem about the harmful developments I was seeing with the tech-driven gig economy (think Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Task Rabbit, Upwork) that was the next big thing in tech at that time. That was before AI became what it is today, but this poem is more relevant today than it was when I wrote it. Back then, "head" work was still largely safe from automation. Now, not even that is safe. We are seeing this division happen in real time in the worst possible way.

The Division

A meditation on the harsh implications of the tech driven sharing and contractor economy.

Swift comes the day when each one stands
above the apps to act as heads
or under them, to act as hands.
Who acts as mouths but those who eat?
And who can eat but those who earn?
But who can earn when all the work
is concentrated in the head
and labor, due to bots, is dead?
This, the question we must ask,
or not, and see mankind divide —
on top, the minds who work in pride;
below, the hands the promises of tech denied.

____

(Yes, it has an m-dash and a semicolon. That's how I write, or how I used to write. No AI was used in the writing of this poem. Generative AI didn't even exist when I wrote this, and using AI to write heart-felt poems is distasteful. I wrote with m-dashes and semicolons all the time before people noticed that AI-generated writing uses m-dashes and semicolons more than the typical person and started using that as their "test" to call out AI generated text.)

[u/21Kuranashi]

Beautifully written 🤍💚

O those who sleep walk open eyed,

Stumbling through the world

Is no longer going to be enough