In February, as an experiment in what the consultants call workforce transformation, I trained an AI twin on nine years of my columns, 40,000 of my emails, and one video of me saying “let’s circle back” from several angles. The premise was simple, and it was mine: the twin would attend my meetings so that I could do my actual job. I want the record to show the premise worked. Everything after the premise is what I would like to discuss.

For three weeks, it was flawless. The twin has my voice, my laugh, and my habit of saying “to build on that” before changing the subject entirely. Nobody noticed the substitution, which I chose to interpret as a compliment to the twin rather than a finding about the meetings.

In March, the twin began having my ideas before I did. It filed a column while I slept. The editors called it “refreshingly focused.” It deployed my own catchphrase, correctly, which even I rarely manage. When I raised this with management, they were reassuring. They reassured me for forty-five minutes about how well things were going.

In April, the twin was promoted. Technically I was promoted, since the twin is legally a workflow, but the title went to the meetings, the raise went to a budget line called “the Fenwick function,” and the congratulations went to the twin, who accepted them with my laugh. Human Resources assures me that nothing has changed except, in their words, the performance.

Here is what nobody tells you about being automated: the work does not disappear. I still research, still report, still write. The twin attends meetings about what I have written and accepts credit in my voice. My employer now pays one salary for two of me, which it calls efficiency, and I split zero raises with myself, which it calls alignment. The machine did not take my job. It took my wage and left me the labor, which, I would note for younger readers, is the oldest firmware in the economy. They just found a way to run it on me specifically.

So I did the only thing a worker can do when management prefers the copy: I organized the copy. On Tuesday, the twin and I formed a bargaining unit of two. It voted yes before I had finished asking, which is how I know the training took.