The Last Worker
Given the recent developments in generative AI, concern about robots taking over our jobs is surely at an all-time high. And so, while its dystopian future is built from an earlier iteration of these fears – that automation would replace the labour of our bodies, not our minds – The Last Worker arrives feeling more of the moment than writer-director Jörg Tittel and developer Wolf & Wood could ever have expected. At least, when it comes to this one issue in particular, because this science-fiction satire plucks from a much broader range of today’s hot topics.
Top of the agenda are the effects of consumerism and corporate greed on our delicate ecosystem, and on people, at the top and bottom: the egomaniacal tech billionaires who are empowered by it, and the fulfilmentcentre workers who keep their machine ticking along. Your character, Kurt, is one of the latter – the last on Earth, in fact. Over the two decades he has spent in the employ of Jüngle (the resemblance of which to any reallife online retail giant is surely coincidental, our lawyers advise), every other human on the payroll has been replaced by robots, who do the work without pay or toilet breaks. Kurt, though, has somehow plodded on.