The Bosses Changed the Music

The shoe repair man on the corner has a bell over his door that sounds older than most governments.

I went in there with a boot that had started talking back to me. The sole flapped when I walked, opening and closing like a cheap mouth. The old man took it from me, turned it over, pressed the leather with his thumb, and made the face of someone reading bad medical news.

“Can fix,” he said.

Not can optimize. Not can unlock value. Not can transform the footwear experience through adhesive intelligence.

Can fix.

There is a whole civilization hiding inside those two words, and most of the men currently selling the future would not know what to do with it if it limped into their conference room and asked for a chair.

The bosses have changed the music again.

For a couple years, the men building the machines told everybody the robots were coming for the jobs. They said it with the solemn tremble of prophets who had just discovered quarterly revenue. Whole categories of work would vanish. White-collar people would learn what factory workers, clerks, drivers, cashiers, warehouse pickers, and poor bastards with repetitive strain already knew: that progress often arrives wearing a clean shirt and carrying a box for your personal effects.

Then the song changed.

Now Jeff Bezos says AI will cause a labor shortage. Sam Altman says he is delighted to be wrong about white-collar work disappearing fast. The apocalypse got recalled. The horsemen were sent back to wardrobe. The new show is all opportunity, growth, builders, entrepreneurs, abundance, and other words that behave nicely when projected behind a man on a stage.

I admire the nerve.

You spend years telling people the tiger is loose, then when the investors start looking nervous and the lawmakers begin sniffing around the cage, you clear your throat and explain that actually the tiger creates meaningful employment opportunities in tiger-adjacent fields.

Beautiful.

This is the sort of trick you learn in rooms where nobody has ever had to argue with a landlord over three late days. Doom is useful until it stops being useful. Optimism is useful until it stops being useful. The truth, poor ugly thing, waits outside smoking in the rain because nobody put it on the guest list.

I do not know whether AI will kill more jobs than it creates. Neither do they. That is the first honest sentence, which is why you will not hear it often. The world is too large, labor is too crooked, and human beings are too stubborn to fit inside the neat little diagrams preferred by men with microphones.

But I know a sales pitch when I hear one.

I heard them at the post office. New machines. New routes. New management systems. Everything was going to make the work easier. Every memo arrived polished enough to see your own tired face in it. Efficiency. Modernization. Service improvements. The words had soft hands.

Then the floor changed.

A man did not become less tired because the memo was optimistic. A woman did not get her knees back because somebody in an office discovered a new way to count her steps. The work moved around. The pain moved around. The people at the bottom were told the future required flexibility, which usually meant bending until something tore.

That is what gets lost when the great men talk about jobs as if jobs are weather systems or crop yields or some abstract fog drifting over the economy.

A job is not an indicator.

A job is a woman calculating groceries in the aisle with her thumb over the total. A job is a father sitting in his car after being laid off because he needs ten minutes before going inside and explaining the new shape of fear. A job is a graduate with a clean shirt and a dead inbox, refreshing listings written by software to be screened by software for companies that swear they cannot find talent. A job is a fashion model seeing a digital ghost of herself on a retailer’s website after being warned fewer people would be needed.

Try telling that ghost about abundance.

The old doom story had its uses. It made the machines seem powerful. It made the builders seem tragic and important, like scientists in a black-and-white film watching their own invention glow ominously in the lab. It also gave companies a convenient fog to hide in while they cut people loose for reasons as old as money.

Sorry, Dave. The algorithm made us do it.

Now the new optimism has its uses too. It soothes regulators. It comforts workers just enough to keep them from picking up torches. It looks better in a prospectus. You cannot march a company toward a public offering while the founder is still out there telling clerks, analysts, designers, paralegals, junior coders, and anyone else with rent due that the machine is sharpening its teeth for their desk chair.

So the teeth become a smile.

The same mouth, naturally.

But the workers are still watching the door.

The layoff notices did not vanish because the billionaire found a sunnier adjective. The entry-level market did not heal because a CEO discovered humility in public. The companies are still buying chips like nations preparing for war. They are still building systems meant to do pieces of human work faster, cheaper, and without needing health insurance or a cigarette break.

Maybe some of those systems will help.

I am not against useful machines. The shoe man had a stitching machine in the back that looked like it could take off a finger and keep humming. Good. Let the machine punch the holes. Let the machine spare the wrist where it can. A tool that helps a worker stay a worker is not the enemy.

The enemy is the old lie wearing a new hat: that whatever benefits the owner will eventually rain gently on the owned.

Sometimes it does.

Mostly it drips.

The better question is not whether AI creates jobs or destroys them. That question is too broad, too clean, too easy for a panel discussion with bottled water and dead eyes. The better question is: who gets the new work, who loses the old work, who owns the machine, who sets the pace, who gets watched, who gets blamed, and who gets told to retrain after thirty years of doing what the economy asked him to do?

There. Now the room is less comfortable.

The men on stage prefer a future made of averages. Average productivity rises. Average wages may increase. Average workers adapt. But nobody has ever come home at midnight with average feet. Nobody has ever explained an average eviction to a child.

The body lives in the details.

The rent is due in the details.

Maybe Bezos is right. Maybe there will be a labor shortage. Maybe Altman really is delighted to be wrong. Maybe the machines will open strange new doors and behind some of them there will be decent work for decent pay, and not just another little platform where humans compete to polish robot droppings for nickels.

I hope so.

Hope is not the same as trust.

Trust is earned by what a man does when it costs him something. So watch what the companies do, not what the bosses say when the cameras are warm. Watch the hiring. Watch the firing. Watch the contracts. Watch whether the tool is handed to the worker or pointed at his back. Watch whether the gains become wages or yachts. Watch whether the people who made the data, trained the systems by living their messy human lives online, and absorbed the risk get anything more than a cheaper subscription tier and a lecture about adaptability.

The shoe repair man handed my boot back with the sole stitched tight and ugly in the honest way useful things are ugly. I paid him in cash. He put the money in a drawer, nodded once, and went back to the bench.

No keynote.

No prediction.

Just a man doing work that held together when it hit the pavement.

That is still the standard, even if the bosses have forgotten the sound of it.

Source: Big Tech said AI would take your job. Now bosses disagree