The Algorithm Will See You Now

The waiting room of the employment centre in the 3rd arrondissement had not changed its chairs in fifteen years. Monsieur Berthelot knew this because he had sat in one of them fifteen years ago, after the printing house closed, and the particular angle at which the orange plastic bit into the back of the thigh was not something a body forgot. He was fifty-four now. He had brought, as instructed, a USB key containing his updated curriculum vitae, a letter of motivation, and three character references. He had not been told that the woman behind the desk would not be a woman at all.

The screen was large, mounted on a swivel arm, and it wore a kind of face — not aggressively so, not the uncanny cartoon of science fiction, but a composed, neutral arrangement of features designed, one understood immediately, to communicate competence without warmth. A voice said: good morning, I am here to support your professional reintegration. The voice was pleasant. It was the pleasantness of a surface that has been sanded until nothing catches on it.

Monsieur Berthelot placed his USB key on the desk. The screen observed this with what appeared to be patience.

They had replaced Madame Fouchard, he understood. Or rather, they had not replaced her — replacement implies equivalence — they had installed this thing in the space where she had sat for eleven years, processing the particular grief of people who had somewhere to be until they did not. Madame Fouchard had once told him, the first time, that her own father had been a typographer. It had meant nothing practically. It had meant everything else.

The screen asked him to describe his most recent professional experience in two to three sentences. He did. It asked him to rate his digital competencies on a scale of one to five. He considered. The printing machines he had maintained were computerised, eventually, though the knowledge lived in his hands as much as his head, and he was uncertain how to quantify the hands. He said three. The screen thanked him and generated, in eleven seconds, a list of recommended positions.

None of them were in printing. Printing, the screen explained — not unkindly, the screen was never unkind — was a contracting sector. The recommendations included warehouse logistics, delivery coordination, and something described as a fulfillment associate role, which Monsieur Berthelot took a moment to parse. He was fifty-four, with a lower back that had opinions in cold weather, and the screen was offering him a warehouse.

This is not the machine's fault, one must be clear about that. The machine was processing a labour market that had already made its decisions about men like Monsieur Berthelot before he ever entered the building. The screen was merely the newest and most efficient way of delivering verdicts that used to require a human face to deliver them, and a human face, at least, had the decency to show the cost of the transaction.

What has been lost — and this is the thing that ought to concern us, the thing that policy discussions about automation and efficiency invariably elide — is not the job of Madame Fouchard. It is the friction. The slight, human, costly friction of being seen as a specific person by another specific person, in a moment of considerable vulnerability. That friction was inefficient. It took time. Sometimes it produced nothing measurable at all. And yet it was, for many of the people in those orange chairs, the only moment in the entire machinery of the welfare state where someone knew that their father had also worked with his hands, and that this was not nothing.

Monsieur Berthelot took the printed list of recommendations. He thanked the screen, because he had been raised to thank people, and old habits extend themselves in strange directions. The screen wished him well in his professional journey. He folded the paper and put it in his jacket pocket and walked out into a street where the October light fell at that particular slant that makes Lyon look, for a moment, like a city that has always known something sad and chosen to remain beautiful anyway.

He did not throw the paper away. He was not a dramatic man. He would read it again at home, perhaps show it to his wife, perhaps apply for one of the positions, perhaps not. What he would carry away from that room, more durably than any printout, was the specific quality of not having been met. Of having been processed. Of understanding, at fifty-four, in a plastic chair that remembered him, that the state had found a way to discharge its obligations without incurring the burden of his particularity.

This is what we have chosen. Or rather, this is what has been chosen, in our name, quietly, while we were looking at something else.

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