Sci-Fi and the Future of Work

Welcome to the 39th edition of Safe For Work. This edition is packed with new releases. A short film written by Marc Andreessen, our first podcast episode, some news, a new SFW Film, and of course, some sci-fi from Matt Cantor. Matt’s story this week leans a little philosophical, imagining a day where machines do all of the work.

In Safety News

• Like Ironman? Warehouse workers will love this new suit to prevent back injuries.

• More good things coming out of Detroit. Wayne State University has new grant funding to help keep mining workers safe from silica exposure.

• Trying to calculate the benefit of safety investment? The Colorado School of Public Health has released a new health risk calculator. It is embedded in a frame on their website, so if you actually want to use the calculator, go here.

Safe For Work Podcast

Episode 1 is available discussing safety, distraction, and incentives.

The Longshoremen’s Pen

Bemused by the longshoreman and New Yorker union news, Netscape founder and A16 venture capitalist, Marc Andreessen wrote a short screenplay on X.

We made the trailer for the film

To Work or Not to Work

Matt Cantor

He wakes up and he looks out his window. There is something beautiful about the rain today, on the leaves of that tree-- do you see that tree?-- do you say the way the raindrops are hitting its leaves?

There is nothing to do.

When Michael sits up a little further, the image is ruined. This isn’t the right angle for seeing it, the way the raindrops are hitting the leaves. He sinks back down, just slightly-- and there it is again.

He moves like he is trying not to startle an animal. He keeps his head and body as still as he possibly can, and when he reaches out his arm towards his nightstand, he goes slowly, slowly, slowly-- as though this perfect vision of the raindrops and the leaves might catch him and go scurrying away somewhere. Michael lifts his phone from the nightstand and slowly, slowly, slowly-- carefully, carefully-- he points the camera out the window. He makes sure that what his phone is seeing is exactly what he is seeing, and then he clicks the button for abstraction. Hold. Hold.

There’s nothing to do.

Hold. Hold.

After a few seconds, the work is done. A perfect poem for a perfect vision-- it really is. Michael reads it to himself, and then he reads it through again-- and then he reads it out loud. Perfect. A description-- but more than just a description, a metaphor, a bit of commentary on the world, on the nature of human regret and hope, gorgeously uncertain things. Michael is old enough to remember when the software was less than good at this-- when it was obsessed with rhyming, for instance, or certain kinds of imagery, over and over again, like preoccupied hallucinations. He is old enough to remember and realize how much it’s changed and grown in all this time it’s had to learn. It’s not at all what it used to be. There’s not a human alive, now-- or ever-- who could see what he’s shown this camera and come up with a poem even half as good. Michael reads the poem one last time, facing away from the window, and he’s absolutely sure that he can see it still. Ten years from now, he’ll be able to dig up this poem from wherever it is on the cloud by then, and he’ll be able to see it still, the view out the window. Ten years from now,he’ll be able to remember this moment, the seeing-- and the feeling. He’ll remember feeling exactly the way he’s feeling right now-- a perfect crystal.

It really is a phenomenal poem.

Michael nods to himself and puts his phone back on the nightstand, and he starts to lay down again-- it’s a Wednesday, or maybe a Tuesday, there’s nowhere urgently to go-- there’s nothing to do. By whatever time he decides to get up out of bed again, his breakfast will be waiting for her in the kitchen fresh and warm-- coffee and whatever he doesn’t even know that he wants yet-- definitely coffee. The coffee will be made by a machine that was made by a machine that was made by a machine. The coffee will be made from water that was purified by a machine that gets fixed by other machines before it ever starts to break. The beans were harvested by machines that care for the soil, pH balance, hydration, fertilizer-- protect the local pollinators, the worms, the badgers-- are there badgers? The beans were brought on a truck built by machines and driven by machines in perfect clockwork traffic-patterns on roads down away from the sunlight and crossing animals and people, powered by electricity from the sun and the wind and the rain and the heat of the Earth.

Michael is old enough to remember back when there were things to do. Or at least things that needed to be done.

What’s he going to do today? He’s going to visit his mother for lunch, probably. He hasn’t seen her for a few days. He misses her. She misses him. But that’s lunch. They’ll get something somewhere-- something cheesy. Whatever it is will be ready for them whenever they arrive-- whatever it is they don’t know they want yet.

On the way down to the mattress, Michael’s eyes catch that perfect view again-- that perfect view that he had just now finished having perfectly captured for himself, for later.

He does something for no reason. There’s nothing that needs to be done. He stays where he is for a long time, and he stares-- again-- for a long time at the poetry of the leaves and the raindrops, until he becomes certain that he could still see it with his eyes closed, and then he rolls over and takes a small bit of paper from the pad on the nightstand, next to his phone. It’s the first time he’s touched it in years-- that or the pen. Michael is old enough to still be doing something like this, keeping a pen and paper on the nightstand for whatever he might need to wake up and write down. He’s old enough to do that, and young enough that every time he’s ever needed to remember something, he’s just murmured it into his phone instead and gone back to bed.

Micheal does something for no reason: he takes the pen and the paper and he writes a poem about the leaves and the raindrops.

“I remember the porch

With my brother

And a baseball,

Leaning forward and

Holding out our hands past the edge of the overhang

To find out how badly it was raining

Even though we could very clearly see it.

I remember

Leaning out a little too far

And one of the raindrops

Landed

Right on the tip of my nose

Instead of my fingers.

I tell the story to the tree

Outside,

And it nods.”

He sleeps for another half-hour-- there’s nothing that needs to be done-- and then he gets himself up again and has the coffee and eggs benedict that he hadn’t even known he wanted. He takes a shower, dries himself off with a towel made by machines from pure cotton harvested by machines and shipped across the sea by ships steered by machines. He watches the news and reads a bit of a book written by machines about a great hero a long time ago-- an amazing adventure-- the sort of thing you could lose yourself in and be lost and be lost and be lost forever.

At a little before noon, he goes outside and steps into the car waiting for him at the curb-- before more than just one or two droplets have had a chance to land on his head-- it’s still raining and raining. The car navigates itself smoothly and easily to the restaurant at the most efficient midpoint between where he lives and where his mother lives. She orders an orange chicken with sesame-seeds-- she’s always loved things with sesame-seeds, like the freckles across her son’s face. Michael has a pasta alfredo-- the machines make it just the way he likes, better than any person ever could have.

They talk-- about all the things they talk about, in their cozy circles. They talk about politics. About how dad is doing. About how Sheila is doing. About the traffic-- do you remember when there was traffic. About the weather-- about the rain, oh, it’s been raining and raining, hasn’t it?

Michael remembers the leaves outside his window. The way the raindrops were falling on them this morning. He takes out the poem he’d written on that little slip of paper and folded into his pocket before leaving. He reads it to his mother-- and as he reads it, he realizes that it really isn’t doing a very good job of making her see what it was that he had seen out that window-- the beauty of it. He isn’t really seeing it in his own head as he’s reading. She certainly isn’t. The poem from his phone would have done that job-- he really should have read that instead.

But Michael likes his poem better.

SFW Films presents: Work Song

As a veteran worker on a remote asteroid, Caelan watches humanity's last hope, the starship Persistence, near completion. With the knowledge that he will be left behind, he contemplates the beauty and sorrow of his final days, finding solace in the rhythmic "work song" of the drones constructing the ship that will carry others to a new future. Adapted from the short story in issue 30.

See you next week as we harness the power of the sun.

Stay safe.