Tom McCarthy sat in his truck outside the closed factory and watched the rain run down the windshield. The wipers were broken. He had meant to fix them for three months. He had not fixed them.

The factory was dark. All of it—the main building, the warehouse, the machine shop attached to the rear. The lights that had been on for forty-seven years were off. The sign on the front said McCarthys Precision in letters that had been painted in 1978 and repainted in 1989 and never since, and the paint was peeling in places where the rain got in and froze and expanded and pulled the letters loose from the brick.

Tom had painted that sign. He remembered the day clearly because it was a Tuesday, his wife Helen had made him a peanut butter sandwich for lunch, and he had worn his good work boots—the ones with the thick soles that made him feel like he could stand on anything and not slip. He had stood on a ladder for six hours, painting letters that would outlast him. He had felt, in the way that only men in their forties who have just been told their company is being automated can feel, a strange and bitter pride.

The letters would outlast him. That was something.

He sat in the truck and smoked a cigarette and watched the rain. He was forty-five years old. He had worked in machine shops since he was eighteen, when he dropped out of Youngstown State after two semesters because his father had a heart attack and there was nobody else to work the shift. He had spent twenty-seven years operating CNC lathes—computer numerical control, which sounded fancy but was really just a machine that did the same thing a manual lathe did, only faster and without asking you how you felt about it.

The company had bought the CNC machines in 2008, during the recession, when labor was cheap and nobody knew if they would still be in business in six months. Tom had learned to program them the way he learned everything—by doing, by failing, by trying again until the part came out right. He had made a good living. He had paid off the house on Elm Street. He had put Sarah through community college. He had bought a boat he never used and a truck he used every day and a life that felt, in the way that middle-aged lives always feel, solid and real and earned.

Then the company bought the robots.

They came in on a Monday in September. Tom was on the day shift. The robots arrived in crates, stacked on a flatbed truck, and were wheeled into the machine shop by men in hard hats and reflective vests who didn't look at the workers who had lined up along the wall to watch them arrive.

David Chen was the regional manager for Future Manufacturing, the company that had supplied the robots. He was fifty, Chinese-American, wore a suit that cost more than Tom's first car, and spoke in a voice that was polite and empty and completely devoid of warmth.

"These will increase our output by three hundred percent," he said to the workers, standing in front of the crates like a man unveiling a statue. "They will improve quality. They will reduce waste. And they will allow us to remain competitive in a global market."

Tom looked at the robots. They were tall and white and sleek, with articulated arms that folded and unfolded like the limbs of an insect. They looked nothing like machines. They looked like something from a science fiction movie. They looked, if he was honest with himself, beautiful.

That was the worst part. They were beautiful. And they were going to take his job.

The robots started running in October. They ran twenty-four hours a day, three shifts, with only brief pauses for maintenance. They cut metal to tolerances that Tom could achieve but only if he concentrated with every ounce of his being, that required years of experience and calloused hands and an intuition that lived in his fingers the way a musician's intuition lives in his ears. The robots didn't need intuition. They needed code. And code, unlike Tom, didn't get tired, didn't get sick, didn't have a son who was drinking himself into an early grave and a house that was slowly being foreclosed on by the bank.

Tom was moved to a different position—equipment monitor, which meant he stood next to the robots and pressed buttons when they stopped and reported errors to a website in India that responded with automated messages about resetting the system. He made twelve dollars an hour, down from twenty-eight. He worked half the shifts he used to work. He spent his days standing next to machines that didn't need monitoring and thinking about the word monitor and what it meant to monitor something that monitored itself.

He found out about the algorithm in March. He was standing next to Robot Three, which had stopped again, when his phone buzzed with a text from a former coworker named Rick, who had been laid off in the first round of cuts.

"Heard something weird," Rick texted. "The robots aren't just cutting parts. They're predicting what parts we'll need next month. Some kind of algorithm. Feeds it order data, material costs, even weather forecasts. Tells the robots what to make before we get the orders."

Tom typed back: That's impossible. Robots can't predict the future.

Rick: They can if they're fed enough data. Heard it from a guy whose cousin works at Future Manufacturing. Says the algorithm's been running for six months. Knew we'd need 400 of part number 7741 before the order came in.

Tom put his phone away and looked at Robot Three. It was white and sleek and silent. It had stopped because of a sensor error, according to the automated message on the website. The Indian support technician had told him to reset the system, which he had done, and the robot was running again.

But Rick's text wouldn't leave his mind. An algorithm that predicted orders before they came in. An algorithm that fed data from order history, material costs, weather forecasts, and probably things Tom couldn't even imagine into a system that told robots what to make.

It was, he thought, the most efficient thing he had ever heard of.

It was also, he thought, the most terrifying.

He stood next to Robot Three for the rest of his shift and watched it work. It cut a piece of aluminum into a bracket—simple, repetitive, precise. The arm moved with a fluidity that no human hand could match. It was beautiful. It was also, he realized, completely indifferent to him. The robot didn't hate him. It didn't love him. It didn't know he existed. It was a machine that cut metal, and the algorithm that controlled it was a system that predicted the future, and Tom McCarthy was a man who stood next to it and pressed buttons and made twelve dollars an hour.

The factory closed on a Friday in November. Tom was on the morning shift. David Chen came out to the floor at nine o'clock, stood in front of the robots, and told them that Future Manufacturing was consolidating operations and that the Youngstown facility would be closing at the end of the month. He apologized for the inconvenience. He thanked them for their service. He said the words that men in suits say when they are firing people and have practiced the words in a mirror until they sounded sincere.

Tom packed his toolbox at noon. It contained three wrenches, a caliper set, a hammer, and a photograph of Helen from before the cancer, when she had hair and smiled with her whole face and the house was full of sound and the boat was parked in the driveway and life felt like something you could hold in your hands the way you hold a piece of metal on a lathe—solid and real and yours.

He walked out of the factory for the last time at twelve-thirty. He drove home in the rain. He parked the truck in the driveway. He sat in it for ten minutes, watching the house—the house he had bought seventeen years ago, the house he was about to lose, the house that contained the memory of a woman who had been dead for two years and a son who had stopped calling six months ago.

He went inside. He made himself a cup of coffee. He sat at the kitchen table and drank the coffee and watched the rain run down the kitchen window. The factory's lights were off. The robots were stopped. The algorithm was running somewhere in a server farm, predicting orders that would never come to this factory, telling machines in other cities to make parts that would never be needed here.

The machine kept running. The rain kept falling. And Tom McCarthy sat at his kitchen table and drank his coffee and thought about the letters on the factory sign, peeling in the rain, painted by his hand on a Tuesday morning in 1978, the last time he had felt like he was building something that would outlast him.

The letters would outlast him. That was something.