A Software Engineer walks into a Bar...

Author's Note: This is a work of fiction, and comes with the caveats of such works.

You'd never seen this place before, despite it being on your usual route home. A small, squalid little place called "The Bus Bar", old neon signage courting passerby into its depths for a drink or social call. It looked simultaneously formal and "neo-modern", in a sense, with rich, dark woods contrasted with EL lighting and LED tube lights; Cyberpunk-meets-Mad Men. An older, portly gentleman was sat at the bar alone, his long, grey beard and coarse hair reminiscent of a fantasy dwarf, while the Old Fashioned between his fingers spoke to someone far more complex.

Somehow, you knew that sharing a drink with him would be of value.

"I had a feeling you'd start showing up about now," the man spoke as you sat beside him, "what with the rough few years you've been having." Did he know you, somehow? From somewhere? You didn't recognize him, yet there was that definite sense of familiarity to be had. The bartender slid you a craft beer from the tap, something delicately refined with human touch instead of repeated by machine - sorely needed, given the glut of AI-generated pull requests you had to approve today.

"Was it always like this?" It was the only question you could really think of in the moment, introductions feeling like a bygone formality. The greybeard sipped at his cocktail, staring blankly into the middle distance.

"Not always. Like everything in life, it started more simply, more noble: to make our lives better. For a while, it did." The sound of plastic buzzing against a motor and the shrill screeching of a cheap speaker pierced the space between you both. "And then it didn't."

You turned back to your beer, the fragile floral aroma being drowned by the harshness of the dry alcohol. "That's...vague."

"The specificity of the question determines the specificity of the answer." The greybeard was gone, replaced by a pasty nerd with thick glasses and a custom eRig clenched tightly in his fist. "You of all people should know that. The fact you don't does not boost my confidence in your shitty products." When did that gentleman become this hostile dweeb? Who was he to nitpick what you did? "I get to nitpick because I'm the one wiping your fucking ass after your product is shoehorned into production." Ah, that rang a bell: one of the ops types, always angry and on edge, always reeking of alcohol or eJuice.

"My product works fine," you return the barb, "maybe you ops people just can't hack it." The nerd laughed a hearty, bellowing guffaw, taking another pull on his rig in lieu of catching his breath.

"You wouldn't be here if you didn't think the same of yourself." The observation stung. "Don't mistake grievances for insults if you want to find friends here." The nerd's phone buzzed, a push notification with an exclamation point suggesting something was urgently wrong.

"And who says I'm looking to make friends?" The defense was half-hearted at best, flagging into denial by the end.

"Because you're here, honey." A middle-aged woman with blue hair and a tanktop swirled around their Cosmopolitan, leaning back in the seat. "Nobody comes here except to commiserate with kindred spirits, and there's few kindred spirits for someone like you outside the IT field."

IT? But you're a software engineer, not some wannabe code monkey. Your code is a symphony, carefully curated and optimized for its core function. Built on decades of mathematics, physics, statistics, models, algorithms-

"Yes yes, honey, we all get it. You're the Mozart of your field, irreplaceable, top of your game, world class talent." She sips at her drink, smiling at its sweetness. "Tell me something: how much human-written code have you produced or approved in the past month?" That...was a question you did not want to answer, though the hesitation alone was answer enough for your companion. "It's alright dear, we've all been through it before." Their smartwatch buzzed with an alert, the woman glancing at it with a scoff before swiping it away. "Getting your PR rejected for using NGINX as your ingress controller is not an emergency, Daryl." She finished her drink, then slid it over the bar for another. "Sorry about that, you've got my undivided attention."

You finish your beer. "Well...was it always like this? Technology, I mean." Your companion waits, silently prodding you to extrapolate a bit. "AI was supposed to make our lives immeasurably better. They write code faster than I ever could, they're supposed to give me back my time, and yet...I feel..." You stammer, not wanting to admit the knot in your stomach to a stranger.

"...ashamed?"

Fuck.

She chuckled slightly, her laugh a bit deeper than the pixie looks might've suggested. "We've all been there, honey. For me, it was watching the Senior who'd mentored me get replaced by my Slackbot for VM requests. I got a promotion out of the Juniors, and he got a hundred-thousand dollar pay cut in his next role for his excellent mentoring." The bartender slid her another Cosmo, which she greedily nipped at. "That sickening twist in your stomach, the knowledge you harmed others with your own improvements. You bought into the lie of progress, and hurt someone you cared about in the process."

"It's not that." You defend, though something about that defense feels...dishonest, as dishonest as the murky reflection staring back at you from the amber surface of your beer mug. "I feel ashamed that I can't keep pace. That the value I provide is a mere reviewer, rather than an artisan. Like I'm just not good enough."

"Are you fucking with me right now?" The woman was gone, replaced with a middle-aged gentleman with tan skin and a wooden cigarette pinched between his lips. "You made significant contributions to - and use of - a product whose stated goal was the complete and total displacement of human labor, and you feel ashamed that you're not good enough?" He plucked the prop from his mouth and knocked back a glass of ice water, anger radiating from his pores. "My god, you people and your inferiority complexes." His mobile phone displayed a stacking number of alerts through its shattered screen, a second pager vibrating atop the counter beside it. "You made good money, worked good hours, and for a fleeting moment of life, got to live your dreams. Yet you feel ashamed that you're not as good as the machine you made."

You look worryingly at the cacophony of alerts in front of the gentleman. "Do you-"

"No," he snaps, "the contract ends next week and the contractor who underbid our sweatshop wages can deal with the fallout from your cheapskate employer. I have literally never been paid to give a fuck." His demeanor makes you bristle, though his point is valid. He too has been replaced, not by physical machine so much as the human machines of outsourcing. "Now you're starting to understand the gears you've found yourself caught within. It is not pleasant to find out you built the machine that would break your bones, and that is why you are here." The prop cigarette found its way between his teeth, bite marks showing repeated gnawing and chewing on its end. "You will not find forgiveness or sympathy here, for we have all committed the same sin. It's best you dispel that notion now."

Forgiveness? No, you weren't looking for absolution, nor were you seeking sympathy. You wanted-

"Guidance." The greybeard returned. "That, we can provide." He looked far more disheveled than before, dust caking the shoulders and bib of his shirt and beard. "Newbie unplugged the PDU for the core networking rack. Again. Simple fix, just...dusty."

"You asked earlier if it was always like this, and I suspect my comrades have helped you winnow down your query to be more specific." You gave a nod, finishing your beer in his calming presence. "That's good. Maybe now you'll ask a good question." It wasn't an insult so much as an observation; or maybe an invitation to begin again.

"Has technology always been like this? Where every problem we solve to make life better, seemingly makes life worse instead?" The gentleman shook his beard out, patting the dust out of it and onto his shirt.

"Mm. Let me ask you this: that tool you made...did it choose to fire workers, depress wages, shrink headcount?" You shook your head; those were obviously human decisions. "Did it give you back time for other, more meaningful pursuits? Did it do work better, or just faster?" Again, you shook your head. It was faster, but the time it took to untangle its output consumed any savings to be had - and had their own energy cost to boot. "Then finish the root cause analysis yourself: if it did not save you time, and it did not fire workers or shrink headcount, then what correlates those two data points together?"

You hesitate, not wanting to sound like some socialist lunatic even as the answer is inescapable. "...leadership?" The greybeard nods sagely, clapping the remaining dust from his hands beneath the bar.

"There's hope for you yet, kid." The bartender slides you another drink, a Cuba Libre. It's sweet, a bit citrus-y, and hides the rum beautifully beneath its caramel tones. Fitting, for such revolutionary discourse.

"You can't blame them entirely, y'know." The pixie chick is back, their tanktop torn at one shoulder, a fresh bruise on their upper chest. "Their calculus is simple: they pay you a fixed rate per year for work, and there's systemic incentive to get you to work as hard as possible, for as long as possible, to optimize the dollar-per-hour you cost them in money. If you're smart enough to invent something that saves you four hours of work per day, but dumb enough to share it with your leadership, then of course the outcome is you either get more work to fill the same time as before, or headcount is reduced to account for the lower workload." They're sipping at straight whisky now, self-medicating in a sense. "You didn't make your life easier, so much as you made them richer, and everyone else's both harder and poorer."

Your new drink goes by quickly, the alcohol loosening your inhibitions. "I got people fired."

"Oh, honey," she leaned over with an air of sweetness, resting her chin on a closed fist. "You got millions of people fired, and the tally is still going up. Give yourself the credit you deserve." That cut like a freshly-forged blade, slicing right through your bones as if they were little more than scrambled eggs. The pit in your stomach is turned into the start of a panic attack, the realization of your impact growing viscerally real. "Hell, not only did you get them fired, but you did so in a society without any safety nets for the unemployed, where healthcare is tied to employment. Your successful research project decimated jobs here and abroad, its death toll incalculable. You didn't just cost them their jobs, you killed them."

The panic attack is full-blown, now, as is the denial. You didn't literally kill people, hell you didn't even figuratively kill people. This was some vindictive patter from some bitch who got roughed up and is taking it out on you. You did nothing wrong.

"There are no consequences and no responsibilities," the pasty nerd quietly replaced the prior patron, "...except that there are." He offered you his eRig, which you anxiously declined. "You should've paid attention to Bradbury when you read Fahrenheit 451 in school. Maybe then you wouldn't have helped invent the torment nexus." What was this shit, some rip-off of A Christmas Carol? Were these your personal fucking ghosts of Technology past, present, and future? "Nah. Not that cliche, at least the author hopes not. Just pastiches of those they've met, the people they've been, the personalities they've admired."

"So this is just a story." The nerd nodded. "And me?"

"A stand-in. The software developers who never had to support their creations, whose total compensation removed them from the working classes from a time. The brilliant minds who wrote code like Mozart wrote music, who changed the world in profound ways they could never possibly conceive of because of their naivete or ignorance both. Those who viewed life as a system of transactions, services, exchanges of capital alone."

"That's...bleak." The nerd laughed, taking a fierce hit of his eRig. "And also reductionist."

"Fiction often is, to communicate the larger points. Hell, people are reductionist towards other people; it's how our brains cope with the knowledge we're one of eight and a half billion other humans, on a single planet in an infinite cosmos that's constantly racing further and further away from us, without going completely insane trying to work out the details."

"So I didn't kill anyone," you sighed with relief.

"Oh, no, you absolutely did. All of us did. Your death toll is just exponentially higher because of your unique contributions." The anxiety returns in force, as if a cold, dark hand is squeezing your heart. "You've contributed to systems designed to replace human labor in a society that predicates survival with labor, and specifically targeting human labor in roles that correlated to higher status and quality of life - lawyers, technologists, physicians, finance, you name it."

"No," you protest, "I built systems that would free humans from labor. I built the means of utopia."

"The fuck you did," the tan gentleman was back, a scowl on his face. "You saw the sole ladder of upward mobility within society - education for higher-wage jobs, which correlated to better health and social outcomes for subsequent generations - and you burned it to the ground. You exploited the final lynch-pin potentially holding the wealthy and powerful to account and removed it from the game, freezing everyone exactly where they are, forever, at best."

"No," you deny again, "I built a tool, using proven methods of research. I was rewarded for my contributions, as the systems of society dictate. How that tool is used is never my fault."

"What are you, four years old? We are accountable for our actions, including the use of our labor and the products derived from it. The only difference between someone like you contributing to AI and some prison labor assembling weapons of war is that you had a choice." He jabs his cigarette prop in your arm angrily. "Accountability remains for both, but yours is exponentially worse for the simple fact that you had agency."

"I fail to see how I'm accountable when it's the systems of society that create the harm." Your denial feels firmer, but it's swept out from under you just as easily as the past defense.

"You created the means of which to inflict vastly more harm than benefit, and profited from it. That was a choice."

"It was business!"

"Still a choice, my friend." Silence hung in the air, still, choking. Your brain, having had a glimpse at the broader systems at play beyond mere personal agency, is struggling to comprehend the wider impact. Your motivation was simple, straightforward, noble, and yet here these strangers were lecturing you for things you could never have predicted, never planned for.

Right?

"It's always been this way." Another woman beside you, long, white hair neatly tucked behind her head in a bun, thick glasses perched atop the bridge of her nose. "We always have the most noble of intents, and that is consistently exploited by those seeking personal reward." She smiled this soft, almost motherly smile at you, its warmth reassuring in the midst of your personal crisis. "What matters isn't that we opened Pandora's Box, so much as how we deal with the consequences thereafter. Someone was going to invent the large language model; someone was going to turn it into a product to be sold; someone was going to pervert it into weapons against privacy, against agency, against reality itself. That was all guaranteed to happen."

Your jaw chattered with anxiety. "...I just thought it'd help people." She sipped at a glass of seltzer, a few cherries and lime slice within infusing it with some mild flavor.

"We all did. If intentions alone dictated outcomes, the world would be a sunnier place for all. Alas, the universe is not that kind - or perhaps that's a good thing, given the malicious intent and aspirations of so many of us." She reached over the bar for a straw, stirring her drink while trying to stab one of the cherries. "The fact remains that you contributed to an invention that has caused undue harm and suffering to millions, with many more in its path. The question is, what will you do with that shame?"

"I don't even know what I could do, given how far along development is. At this point, I'm just reviewing pull requests from AI outputs; the actual work is out of my hands."

"There's always sabotage," the nerd was back, twirling his eRig between his fingers. "Approve bad PRs, especially ones that delete or destroy work. If enough Amazons have outages due to bad chatbots or coding assistants, they'll throw them out. You'll get fired, sure, but you can always just blame burnout and pivot into a speaking gig warning about the dangers of accelerating work with AI without giving humans a break to deal with the output." That's...an option, though being fired wasn't exactly on your list of career goals.

"Diplomacy and Democracy are in dire need of fresh blood like yours, kid," the pixie chick was back, looking a bit better than before - and with a fresh pink streak in her blue hair. "You've got the funds and connections, why not stake it on a campaign for government? You know better than anyone what's needed - and how to recognize the harms of mandating this tech everywhere. Regulation isn't as dirty a word as the CE-Bros would have you believe; it's just a counter-weight to the bottomless pit of human excess." Government? Seriously? Not a chance. "Then volunteer for someone with the backbone to stand on principle and not take funds from big business or wealthy pricks. They always need the help, and you could do with the warm fuzzies."

"That doesn't help me, though. It doesn't soothe my anxieties, it doesn't make my day easier. It's asking me to take risks in an environment where the safest move for me is to simply not play."

A glass shattering on the bar startles you from your seat, the gentleman with the cigarette prop seething mad. "That's because none of this is about you. You've made the money, you have the safety net, you have the ability to weather the storm of your own making." Blood drips from the hand that smashed the glass, staining the man's khaki pants. "You are not the main character, you colossal buffoon. You have contributed to mass displacement of labor, and instead of worrying about those you harmed, you're merely trying to paper over your personal anxieties? To try and find a path forward for personal fulfillment of a passion you contributed to destroying?" The knot in your stomach surges into your throat, fearful that this man may kill you where you stand. "I had to climb over the failed attempts of 23,000 of my countrymen for the opportunity to naturalize here. I have suffered exploitation by your hand, for wages you're too good to accept, from employers too greedy to pay fairly, in abysmal working conditions, and all for a chance for my children to have the possibility of a better life than I did - a possibility that you stole."

He thrust his blooded finger past your vision towards the door. "If the only thing you can think about is your own feelings, then do the rest of us a favor and lie down in front of a train. At least then there's one less selfish bastard blocking the rest of us from doing something." You didn't have a response to this; how could you? You didn't live his life, understand his sacrifices, his plights.

"That's the trick, kid." The greybeard was back, blessedly. "You don't understand the plights of others, because you've never lived them, or considered them. Those who have never been homeless cannot hope to solve the homelessness crisis. Those who have never struggled for housing cannot address its affordability. The same goes with you: someone who has never suffered the trauma of a prolonged job loss, the loss of a career due to technology, the loss of a future from a fundamental societal shift, the persecution based on inalienable features - you cannot fathom the harm you have caused, and so you do not realize that you're not the victim, here, but the problem." His dress shirt was replaced with a graphic tee, his appearance far more casual. "You gotta talk to more people, kid. Try talking to the old fart who can't find work in his fifties because he's 'too old to code' and at risk of losing his house, for instance."

"Or the queer woman living out of her van because she's not paid enough to make rent compared to her peers."

"Or the immigrant who left everything behind for a chance at a future that no longer exists."

"Or the ops guy who works three times as many hours for a fifth of your pay just so you don't have to be on-call, who is going to be replaced by either a chatbot or some foreign sweatshop, and then blamed for asking for 'too much money' or better working conditions."

You look down at your empty glass. "This feels a bit personal."

The older woman swirls her seltzer around with the straw. "Technology is personal, dear, deeply so. Everyone has specific tolerances, needs, wants, preferences. The beauty in technology wasn't standardization so much as personalization: the ability to improve life on the terms that mattered to you, not merely what served the interests of others. It was always meant to be opt-in, rather than opt-out." She sipped at it, the lime slice catching on the bottom of the straw with an audible burping noise. "As with all things, those who sought power or wealth identified ways to exploit it for those ends. We just failed to guard against them, so powerful was our naivete that technology was progress, and progress a net-good."

That point hit home, oddly enough. Lightbulbs with bluetooth that talked to servers a thousand miles away, fridges that screamed ads at you when you opened the door, libraries of infinite content slathered with adverts, scams, and slop. Whatever good was there had long since been obliterated or supplanted by harmful technologies loudly braying about 'progress', though never clarifying to whom.

"Don't let the others intimidate you too badly; they've had a rough go of it, and these LLMs threaten them with even more harm right as they felt they were finally getting a leg up on things. Their anger is righteous and just, but it's only directed at you so long as you continue to harm them."

"Then how do I stop hurting them?"

"That part is both incredibly easy, and impossibly difficult. It's the one skill most of us never bothered to learn until it was far too late, until our harms too vast to rectify."

You had a feeling you knew the answer by now, but still wanted it laid out for the audience.

"You listen."