If ChatGPT Takes All My Jobs… Things are mostly perfect. Mostly. Chilling on a balcony, watching wooden fishing boats with tall prows on the North Atlantic from a surfing hostel in warm, sunny, breezy Taghazout. The host gave me a speaker, and said he liked my music. I have this shaded seaside patio all to myself. But you see…I’m reading about this ChatGPT thing. Watching some videos on it. A year ago, AI could only write non-sequiturs that demonstrated there was no real mind buried in all the algorithms. “Batman throws Alfred at the clue.” Moronic sentences based on frequency of word use. But now…now it’s good. Kids are making it write college essays for them. It can crank out an advertisement, an SEO article, a web page, anything I ever got paid money to write. Non-sequiturs and headaches aside, it’s only a matter of time before employers figure out you don’t have to pay for ChatGPT’s health insurance. Plus, the technology will only get better going forward. For now at least, Odd Jobs & After Hours isn’t bringing in enough to replace my “real” jobs. And now they’re building a robot to replace those. Time to become something else. But what? Plenty of people did during the Industrial Revolution, right? Fair is fair. But maybe…there isn’t a “something else” to become, and this ChatGPT thing signals the long, slow slide towards homelessness. Sleeping in bus stops in the rain, wondering what happened to the guy with the laptop job surfing and partying across Europe, South America, and Africa, I mean, it’s not impossible, right? It’s not historically unheard of, it’s not – “Tom! Tom! We must go to Agadir for a couple of hours. We leave you in charge of the hostel?” I sit up and take off my sunglasses. Samad, the host of the hostel is peering around the corner, desperation in his eyes. “Samad. I’m on vacation.” “Yes, yes, of course, but for one hour, two hour, you answer the door if it rings, give new person towel from behind the desk, ask their room number and bring them there? We bring you anything you want from Agadir, anything to eat, drink, smoke, tell me and it’s yours.” “Thanks, but I’m stocked up. I don’t need anything from Agadir.” “Please, we are out of staff, and if you must leave, of course this is OK, but if you will be here with your music anyway…please?” Seagulls crow and dive for fish. “Ok, you got it.” Samad clasps his hands in gratitude, and off he goes on his motorbike to Agadir. Mostly, I hang out and do exactly what I was already doing. One guest arrives in half an hour, and I bring him a towel and show him to room four. Easy. Now as an American, you spend a ton of time around well-run businesses. You just do. And looking around at the surf hostel I now run, I consider everything that went wrong when I arrived. The vision becomes clear: hire some of local women to do the towel and linen washing, get that running like a clock. Spice and punch up the online description to sell the place on its ambiance a little better. Convince the building owner to spend a little more and therefore earn a little more, and not over-extend his two-man staff so much they have to ask some guest for help. I mean, from what I’ve seen Samad never sleeps. Get my book Odd Jobs & After Hours here. It’s about drifting down the east coast of the USA chasing one sketchy, so-called opportunity after another. Get it in hardcover, paperback, or audio at the link. Replace the hasty iPhone photos with something more cinematic. Get a staff schedule in ship-shape. Pay nice local ladies on the block for couscous dinners for the guests every night. Easy upsell. Heck, get a live music night organized right here on this patio. There’s enough banjo and oud guys playing the streets for pennies. Let’s get those guys earning a little more too. I’ll upsell guests on beginner surfing lessons. I am good enough to teach those now. Let them build a robot that can do all those things at once. And oh yeah, I’ll ferry to Spain often enough to dodge customs officials, because when you work abroad, tons of jobs will give you anything but a visa. As for a retirement plan, I simply won’t have one. As for the dentist, I simply won’t go. As for emergency funds, I will simply not have emergencies. That works, right? Three hours pass, and Samad returns with potato chips, Kinder bars, and beer as a thank you. Who knows? Maybe there’s a future in this surf hostel thing. No more wandering, just pick a nice place and stay there. Give up my hard-earned freedom and return to long hours stuck in one place. Clean up after 4AM parties and surf whenever I carve out time and gather energy for it. No matter how many times I tell the guest I let in and showed around I don’t really work there, they ask me for things all week long. Guess I’m hired.
Riptide & Camel Ride Paddling, paddling like crazy in the foamy water and big waves off the shore of an African surf and fishing village called Taghazout in Morocco. There’s no ATM in town, so you have to bike to the next village over to get cash. It’s just that kind of place. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I am convinced I can rip on a short board, so I have rented one along with a wetsuit, and I am getting churned, tumbled and plunged under waves like you would not believe. This is session two for the day. Did one in the morning, and the sun is going down now. In a calm moment on the water, when I turn to face shore, the village is…gone. Only tan desert hills with dark green splotches of short juniper trees cover the landscape. Get my book Odd Jobs & After Hours here. It’s about drifting down the east coast of the USA chasing one sketchy, so-called opportunity after another. Get it in hardcover, paperback, or audio at the link. One mansion with a high wall and big tinted windows stands alone. North-ish of me, deep in the distant hills, there is a tiny stripe of white cubes. Buildings veiled by haze. Those cubes are the hostels, restaurants, cafes, and surf shops of Taghazout, where I am staying. Miles and miles away. How did it get so far away so fast? Those riptides are sneaky, treacherous entities, huh? Nothing to do but start the long, slogging trek back in wet sand. But wait, what’s this? A man in a blue robe and straw hat is napping between two camels in the shade of a dune. One camel is tan and one camel is white. The logical choice, the correct decision becomes clear. What’s more, on impulse, I stuck 100 Dirham in the back pocket of my board shorts. That’s ten dollars in American money, and it is the key to unlocking this whole situation. The guy with camels is named Hassan. The tan camel is Bolo, and the white camel is Carlos. “Can we ride back to Taghazout?” Hassan nods and grins. “Even if I got this?” I show him the surfboard. He looks at the cameIs and nods. “Be careful,” Hassan says. “They spit.” “Can’t be worse than my last wipeout. Imagine doing 20,000 ice cold neti pots at once.” Hassan laughs. “Clears the sinuses, though.” I will be riding Carlos the white camel. Hassan shows me the stirrup, a metal bar, and how to get up on the dark red, hand-woven, rug-like saddle. Then Carlos stands up. Back legs first, and I’m pitched forward at a steep angle, gripping the surfboard under my armpit, lurching and staring at the back of Carlos’s long, hairy neck with its patches of knotted, dust-filled fur. Up go the front legs, and here we are. What an elevated view of the ocean and shore. Hassan mounts Bolo, and we start towards Taghazout carried by the forward rock and roll motion of the indolent, dour lipped, heavily-lidded camels. “I take your surfboard,” Hassan says. I press the yellow board deeper into my armpit. “No, I got it.” “Please, I carry for you.” “You wouldn’t ask a knight to let someone else carry his sword, would you?” This, Hassan understands. He laughs and does not offer again. The waves that plunged me under and rolled me all evening long are roaring to the left. The desert hills with their tent camps and RVs stand to the right. On a camel, wearing a wetsuit and surfboard, plodding back to where I’m staying. It does make me wonder, if ever a term such as camel hypnosis was coined. How can it not exist? Drying out under desert sun, gently rolling along without so much as a car stereo to distract you. “These guys must get great miles to the gallon.” Hassan stares at me. “Of water!” Now Hassan stares at me while I laugh at my own joke. Nice, cool, we’re having a good time. Eventually, when we arrive at the eroded, worn out, stone rocks that lead up to Taghazout, the camels kneel once more, again with their steep pitch forward. “Thank you Hassan, and thank you Carlos.” I unzip my wetsuit, find the soaked, but honestly still very crisp 100 Dirham note, and give it to Hassan. It might be too much, it might be too little, but it’s all I have, if you know what I mean.