The End of the Human Race
Time Space Warp #77
Hey — It’s Toffer.
It used to take me the whole night.
Yesterday the machine did it in nine seconds.
I sat there, waiting to feel free.
I felt fired.
Estimated read time: 2 minutes
For years, the work was the doing. The website down at 2am, and me the only reason it came back up before the client woke up. That was the job. More than that, it was proof I was useful. I could out-work the problem. I was fast.
Fast is the thing that just died.
Somewhere back there, someone sold us a story about the brain. Left side for the logic and the numbers. Right side for the dreaming. Spend your life stuck on the left, they said, and if you’re lucky, someday you cross over to the right and finally get to imagine.
Turns out that story is made up. There is no left-brained person and no right-brained one. They wired up a thousand brains to check, and nobody runs on half.
But there was a wall. I spent years sure it ran through my head. It ran through my week.
The wall was the doing. All those hours being the fastest executor in the room. We called it discipline. It was a race, and the prize for winning was getting to run it again tomorrow.
The human race is ending. And I think it might be the best thing that ever happened to us.
The machine will make anything you point it at. It can’t tell you what’s worth making. For twenty years I never had to ask. There was always a fire to put out, a website to bring back up, a night to survive. The wanting got buried under the doing.
Now the doing is gone. The night it used to eat is yours again. And the only question left is the one you were always too busy to ask.
What do you want to make?
Your Friend in Time,
Toffer