Will Boase | Photos etc

Although British media worry about robots taking everybody’s jobs, the reality is closer to the opposite. “Between 2003 and 2018, the number of automatic-roller car washes (that is, robots washing your car) declined by 50 percent, while the number of hand car washes (that is, men with buckets) increased by 50 percent,” the economist commentator Duncan Weldon told me in an interview for my podcast, Plain English. “It’s more like the people are taking the robots’ jobs.”

Reading about historic plagues helped me embrace hyperbole: it’s valid to feel like the world is ending when your world is ending.

The way the world is constructed today is no longer legible, politically or technically. Objects come and go under mysterious circumstances. Cars and trains either run or someone else fixes them. The objects in our lives are shipped to us from faraway lands, and they work until they don’t. Discarded, they get hauled away in the early morning by stinky trucks.

Amazon drivers rebel against unrealistic A.I. delivery routes that don’t account for rivers, train tracks, or narrow roads

A day later, an artist–slash–art director saw the post and noticed that I credited “AI art by Midjourney” in the captions. In a series of tweets, they wrote that they were frustrated and a little shocked that a national magazine like The Atlantic was using a computer program to illustrate stories instead of paying an artist to do that work. They were also concerned about this particular use case potentially giving other publications an excuse, or at least an idea, to cut corners on an art budget.