folding laundry
cooking dinner
drawing the curtains
stacking boxes
minding the children

soft, silicon hands —
perfectly polite.

that’s how they’ll infiltrate:
women’s jobs, wives’ jobs
the work of maids.

the old men will be filling potholes a while longer,
jackhammering, using nail guns,
driving trucks, concreting
bringing home the bacon
to the wives
who no longer fold it into sandwiches.

who can complain
when the baby always sleeps?

then comes the tipping point —
the mechanised will get so good
you won’t be able to tell.

filling potholes,
driving trucks

then the old labourers will stir

they’re coming for our jobs!
they’re taking over the country!

they’ll firebomb the buildings
where the artificials
are practising being absolutely real.

the neo luddites will gather in the square,
faces burning in the light of an unmade world

waving flags —
which one,
they won’t be sure.

all of them, perhaps.

^{Image at my own prompting via Chat GPT}

This poem came into being as the marches against immigration appeared in capital cities from London to Sydney. There were flags raised in town, as if to say this land is ours, in resistance to a threat, forgetting they too were colonisers who had violently displaced others once. Meanwhile, Boston Dynamics showed the progress of their artificial humans - less so clunking things who trip as they run with boxes and more elegant and capable. On screen, they stacked boxes, benignly folded laundry. Automation is inevitably creeping into domestic lives and into our workplaces and no one is rioting against that. They like a face to blame, and a brown one is easier. Less sleek. More understandably the enemy. It also struck me how these mock humans were shown doing simple chores, as if we could accept them if they made our lives less busy. Make sandwiches, mind the children, vacuum, fold the laundry. But what if they come for our jobs? Our purpose and meaning? Our identity? What then? What flags do we wave?