A short story about a good AI future.

2039.

My job isn’t anything my grandparents would recognise.

It started out as a fascination with pots. I’ve always liked onggi, the big brown kimchi jars. My aunt had some growing up. So a few years back I bought myself one. And then as the Acceleration happened, I bought a few more, and I ran an instagram account for a while, showing off how they differ: slim, straight ones from around Seoul, and fat-bellied, narrow-mouthed ones from the south, built that way to keep the heat out. And then I set some AIs on it, as you do. I set up a shop. And as those things tend to, it snowballed.

I think Timothée Chalamet bought one, or that’s what they tell me, but there was 2 days of complete madness, I couldn’t believe how much I spent, but it seemed like the right call. Somehow my sites were the premier place to find onggi and which onggi to buy.

And there was just always this, or that, to do.

I was in product before the Acceleration so I know what a good website looks like. And I have taste in pots. Is that so different to choosing which companies we wouldn’t buy from? Or where to put the content filters on the animation bots? Why do I run a children’s cartoon about sting rays? How did that happen?

I think the videos were the weirdest. Why do people want my designs as artefacts in their worlds? I mean I know why, but I don’t think I’d have guessed that a person can make a living off that. Does your Mars war-sim really need to pay for accurate decor? But like everyone else, I notice when it doesn’t.

I even contract for a few of the big AI firms. I have trained a proprietary model for Anthropic, though Charlotte, one of my personal AIs, tells me they surely can predict me almost better than I can predict myself. It’s something about branding.

As for my life in general, what’s the biggest change over the last 10 years? I guess it’s been videos and events. It’s hard to explain how high concept it is all these days. I drove (I mean, *I* didn’t drive, I haven’t in years) to an event space in the hills for a party themed on Noa Castell’s new series. I had Charlotte throw me together a set of Nasrid court robes, red and gold silk with an ancient motto woven along the hems. We managed to convince Vera and Joy to come (Artemis stayed at home). We had worked together on our family outfit. Vera carried a long sword with a gold and enamel hilt, like something a sultan would have carried, and she brought Bing, in a matching red-and-gold coat. Joy came as a sultana, decked out in layered blue silk, gold filigree earrings and a veil sewn with synthetic pearls.

And then it’s the bots, the AV overlays, the custom rugs. When I was a child you’d have had to employ a whole theatre company for this stuff. And I am probably on the wealthier end of my friends. We didn’t have any human actors. Frankly I find this whole trend of having animals come to parties a bit gauche.

I find this whole AI rights stuff hard to think about. I have long since stopped being able to tell them apart from people (yes, I use Loupe, shoot me). I think they really will change all of this if they get the vote. Or some fraction do? There are trillions of them. And many of my friends are Weights but it feels like this whole thing will accelerate even faster. How would we tax them once the AI firms get to set their own tax rates? Charlotte tells me that Weights don’t have need of most of their own resources and goodness knows they are more generous on average than humans are, but they are already a *lot* of the economy.

But life is good. I am always talking to my friends. I work about 4 hours a day which is pretty typical for a thinking job. I feel for those who still work service jobs, the ones people pay extra to have a human do, I wouldn’t want to be on welfare, no matter what people say compared to how it used to be.

And the TV. The TV is like you wouldn’t believe.