Assigned meaning

The internal half of the allocation problem, and the more disturbing one. Under allocated labour, a system tells you what to do and you can at least locate the system. Here the purpose has been absorbed. There is nothing left to refuse, because refusing would mean refusing yourself.

Ishiguro's clones have a complete professional vocabulary — student, carer, donor — and organise their entire inner lives around advancement through it. The novel contains no AI at all, and belongs here anyway: it is the clearest account anywhere of a purpose manufactured for someone else's benefit and experienced as one's own.

Two unrelated works called Severance, published four years apart, arrive at the same structure from opposite directions. Ling Ma's novel has a woman commuting to her publishing job through the collapse of civilisation because she cannot conceive of not going. The series performs the surgery that makes it literal — a self that exists only inside the work, for whom the job is not part of a life but the whole of one.