#OpenToBeSeen

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection, being founded not upon compassion, experience, or evidence (those dangerous indulgences), but upon the far sturdier pillars of impatience, spreadsheet logic, and the confident opinions of people who are already employed.

I think it is agreed by all parties that the sight of a person seeking a job is at best uncomfortable, and at worst an accusation. Their resumes wander the land like vagrants, begging for attention, cluttering inboxes, and forcing respectable hiring managers to remember that fortune, rather than virtue, plays some role in human affairs. This alone is reason sufficient to do nothing whatsoever to assist them.

Therefore, I shall lay it down as a maxim: no help ought to be given to anyone looking for a job. For if employment were truly deserved, it would already have occurred. The invisible hand, having once mislaid them, clearly meant to do so. Any attempt to intervene is not charity but vandalism, scribbling over the clean, moral lines drawn by the market.

I submit these observations with the utmost seriousness, trusting that no reasonable reader would mistake their neatness for humanity, or their efficiency for wisdom.

As to the unemployed themselves, I confess I have long admired the admirable efficiency with which society has blamed them for their condition. For what is unemployment, after all, but leisure enjoyed incorrectly? The poor wretch without work is not a victim of cycles, offshoring, automation, or managerial fashion, but rather a moral lesson in motion. To employ such a person would be to interrupt the sermon.

I shall next address the matter of older workers, whose greatest sin is that they remember things. These persons, by the mere passage of years, have acquired wages inflated by experience, loyalty, and prior promises, none of which appear on a quarterly earnings call. They are said to produce less, though no one can precisely measure what they produce, nor can anyone remember how the systems work once they leave.

Yet we are assured, by those half their age and twice their confidence, that wisdom depreciates faster than software, and that the ideal workforce is one that resets every five years like a phone contract. This belief, I am told, is not bias but disruption.

Some have timidly objected that today's young managers, having established these principles, may one day themselves become older workers. But this is a groundless fear. For it is universally believed that when they age, circumstances will be entirely different. History, after all, has a well known habit of ending just before it becomes inconvenient.

I now come to the most elegant part of my proposal: Artificial Intelligence, that stainless and tireless entity which neither asks for raises nor calls in sick, and whose confidence grows in perfect proportion to its ignorance. We are assured it will add more to GDP than working adults ever could, which is a great relief, as it spares us the trouble of dealing with those adults at all.

Why endure the inefficiency of human judgment, training, morale, or meaning, when we may instead worship a system that produces charts? Charts, after all, have never unionized, never aged, and never asked what any of this is for.

I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in promoting this necessary work, having no need of a job myself, and being content to watch from a safe distance as labor is optimized out of existence. My chief motive, as always, is the public good, particularly the good of those already doing well.

I shall conclude by humbly suggesting that if these proposals appear harsh, it is only because they are already widely believed. I have merely done the nation the service of writing them down.