One of the devs has been filling in a table of random NPCs. They've made a few dozen, and they're already really incredible in their variety and fit into the setting. You can see a handful of them below.
I thought I'd share some and solicit and try to crowdsource some more. More NPC suggestions would be highly appreciated!
...
Chorus of Wires, a synth who cares for the Vivarium at Lincoln Heights. They are fans of unusual semi-edible fruits.
Jumping Colour, often found with one of her long haired dogs at the Paws Salon on Clifford Street. She does animal work sessions at Preschools all over the city.
Port Fraxinius, runs the haberdashery on the corner of Gateway Boulevard. He’s a good listener, although sometimes secrets bubble up at his Poet’s corner performances
Garter Buffman. Involved in several camping and outdoor clubs in Azusa. Unusually suntanned for a non-humanoid synth.
Rhussel Olean. Spends three days a week on his Bike Kitchen drifting up and down Adobe Avenue. Is also Building resident union rep for the ‘Production artists and designers bikeshop’
Skates von Spikes. Knowledgeable manager of Clean Sheets Drug Space at Del Ray. Off duty she can be found at her building resident union, or the Baha’i temple.
Questionable Skunk. Operates out of a room opposite the Sculpture Garden, Cosmo Street. He doesn’t ask many questions. He doesn't welcome them either.
Cactus Bronzefinger. Performance set builder at the FabboWoodo workshop, West LA. He has a couple of lemur themed augmentations, that he claims are helpful backstage.
Punchcard Stipa. A synth that uses ‘his’ pronouns. He helps out at the Thermophile Spa, Hollywood hills, and has been adapting his chassis to act as a safety officer. That’s an ambition currently unfufilled.
Diskrhust. They split their time between the animal shelter, teaching self defence at the local recreation hall, and monitoring orbital shifts at the Union of Skylands on Norwalk Boulevard.
Coyote Ace. A name they might yet grow out of, Coyote is at highschool, but has their eye on a empty space on Holt Avenue that they dream of running their own wired haberdashery from
TurbineThyme is a synth who lives in the basement below New Theater on New Avenue. She’s still exploring what her body can do, and where that might lead her.
Bolt Chitalpa. A coder by arrangement on Hilliard Avenue. He also writes periodically for the Circle of Nations.
Chappie Arral. Purveyor of soap and other homegood chemicals off Whittier. He attends a church of latter-day saints group that meet early mornings in the park.
5 Steps, as he is known, is a wandering preacher, tracing a route between the Hindu Temple, Baha’i church and Protestant Chapel in Culver City.
Ohm Tatsoi is a practicing doctor and muslim. They are currently feuding with the Vivarium staff over alleged class snobbery.
Friendly Marguerita is a synth and coach at a boxing gym at Culver City. They are studied at projecting an authoritative calm amongst angry teenagers.
EriDuct is a surprisingly old synth usually found holding court at Poet’s corner, Torrance. On a good day, she’ll tell you about her old lives.
Hoof Rust is a kite dancer synth, usually found high above Altadena. His broadcasts on high altitude biochemistry are well respected, although his body is far too large to allow access to a regular lecture theater.
Slick Basil. Street seller of whatever needs selling, they sometimes can be found with a flower tray outside the Hindu temple in Agoura Hills, although just as often selling chits at the Union of Skylands, or mouthwash at Granry16.
... and so on.
I think this post is a cope.
You might be 100% right. But that wouldn't change the fact that you're focusing on the individual in a story about trends, and I think you're doing so because doing so is a way to avoid engaging with the larger point of the article.
Tech work isn't safe. No work is really safe these days. It doesn't even matter if AI can do your job well. It is just a facet of a project to devalue labor and disempower laborers. And that project is going really well! No matter how good you are at your job, none of us can "merit" our way out of that project.
I'm great at my job, and my job is very AI proof. But that doesn't protect me from the fact that my company is looking for ways to gigify the work and hire contract workers from among highly paid laid off scientists and engineers to take over little easy parts of my job. They'll concentrate the hard parts, of my job and yours, and reorganize it until it's as modular as possible, and raise our workloads without increasing our pay until they can make it hard enough to say we're not doing it fast enough.
No chatbot will replace me in the next 10 years. But my company doesn't need them to in order to limit my bargaining power! They're fostering an ecosystem of abundant cheap, fungible atomized workers so they will never have to bid for your labor or worry about you being irreplaceable.
All of us need to get wise to the con. We need universal incomes, universal services, universal healthcare, universal housing. We need a guaranteed safety net that is high enough that everyone has the ability to turn down bad jobs. Even the people you think suck at their jobs.
You cannot escape this by dismissing any laid off worker as too slow to keep up. Because this is a team event. And the bosses are on the other team.