The 25th Percentile
An essay/short-short story
I’m in marketing at Google’s AI/Gemini. My job is to convince the public that Gemini empowers. In fact, that’s dwarfed by the disempowerment. LLMs like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude ever more decrease our ability to work — AI job displacement, and to think: Its algorithm quietly gets us to think the way Gemini’s tuners do — largely liberal San Francisco 20-somethings. Orwell (1984) was prescient.
To be honest, I’m less worried about society than about my self-preservation. I’m not the weakest employee in my group but maybe 25th percentile. And indirectly, my job is to put me and millions of others out of work. The argument that AI will create more jobs is overoptimistic. Certainly, for the years between displacement and replacement, the operative word is “pain.”
So, I’m stressed at work. Google is a stressful place, with all those smart people and a culture that mouths work-life balance but quietly encourages 9–9–6: work 9 to 9, six days a week. And unlike in some workplaces, “work” actually means working most of that time — not a lot of Minecraft or texting sweetie.
So, when I get home, I have to de-stress. You see, apart from the external stress, I am stress-prone. I catastrophize everything and, at the 25th percentile, my fear of unemployment in an ever more job-eating tech-centric, global-workforce world, is realistic.
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So, at home, I spend most of my time cooking, listening to music, and — this is embarrassing — watching cartoons. Would you believe I own all 49 episodes of Wily Coyote and the Road Runner?
Well, I was watching Wily about to get forced off a cliff for the umpteenth time when the power went out.
First thing I did was to go to the fridge and get the yogurt and coffee from this morning that I didn’t finish because I was running late. Then I collapsed back again on my well-named Stressless chair, with nothing to distract me from worrying— No Roadrunner, no music, no stove to cook on.
So, no surprise, my mind went to being at the 25th percentile, not just me but everyone. What’s going to happen? Universal Basic Income? There won’t be enough money, even if government additionally soaks the rich and, yeah, Big Tech. We will see big-time poverty and second-order effects: depression, drug abuse, feeling useless, crime, and increasing paroxysms of chaos, what the media (including Gemini) anesthetizes as “social unrest.”
The power came back on and Roadrunner continued off the cliff — It’s not just a cartoon. I hit the off button harder than necessary.
I read this aloud on YouTube.
Marty Nemko is a career and personal coach, and author of 36 books including Work Stories and A Dose of Reality. You can reach him at mnemko@gmail.com
