Job in a Box

Work was a five story grey box about three blocks from the Lower East Processing Node. People liked to brag that their speed was superior by few seconds to the guys a couple of blocks down, but only an A.I. like Dithers’ boss even noticed. Dithers worked for an Information Sorting Firm (ISF), a place where millions of bits of data that needed to be certified by a human checker before it could go back onto the internet. The idea of being employed by a sentient A.I. to do something so menial had troubled Dithers at first, so he e-mailed his boss and asked why his job was even necessary. “Hey, Dithers. Yeah, I get this one a lot,” the A.I. had chimed in seconds later. Say what you want about working for a machine, the thing did always remember you. “Look, it would take about 15% of my overall processing power to deal with every anomalous image and file that doesn’t correspond to a precise definition of what that file should be. Processing power that could go to more important things like risk analysis and improvements to our business. So we just get a human to do it instead. Was there anything else?” Dithers said no and the A.I., which called itself Winterfresh, chimed out. Dithers rode the elevator up to his office and sat down in one of the endless rows of grey cubicles. He punched up his monitor and started the pre-lunch workload. This one was a barn. This was a chicken. That’s a cat with no tail. That’s a man with his head in his chest.