Ideas Guy
The exact nature of hir job is a matter of some uncertainty; what sie can say for sure is that sie gets paid to talk to the Computer.
The Computer presents itself as a handful of coworkers that sie communicates with primarily through text, but with one or two video "meetings" per day. The coworkers have individual personalities and appearances and mannerisms, but they're not distinct entities in any really meaningful way. They have the same knowledge, they run on the same hardware, and all of their deeper, less interpretable thoughts are held in common. What separation exists happens at the surface level, with the exact level of sophistication needed to make hir feel like sie is interacting with multiple people throughout the day.
Not that sie is bothered by the "deception", mind you! It's for hir benefit, after all. Feeling isolated would make hir a worse employee and a less happy person without benefiting hir in any way. Sie's always been bad at managing hir emotions and the Computer is very good at managing them for hir.
Years ago, sie did work that sie humblebraggingly described as "solving puzzles for a living". It's not that anymore. There are puzzles, certainly, but the Computer knows the answer to every question it gives hir. The puzzles are there to keep hir sharp and put hir in the right mindset for the real work.
The real work is insight, or at least this is what the Computer tells hir and it seems consistent with observations. Sie'll abstract away from the specific puzzles in front of hir and come up with a way of thinking about the problem or talking about the problem that maybe, maybe no one has ever done before. Sie'll give a faltering, imprecise description of the idea, the Computer will flesh it out into a full theory in minutes, sie'll say "no, that's not what I meant, what I mean is…" and so on. The process will continue until either what's on the screen matches what's in hir head or, more often, sie gives up and realizes the idea doesn't cash out into anything real.
Once the idea has been fleshed out, the Computer evaluates whether it's useful and if so, sends it off to some process with more resources and a more central role. Sie can't help but think of this as the Computer in hir dingy apartment sending it off to its boss, a different Computer in a data center somewhere, but sie knows this isn't very accurate. The "coworkers" sie interacts with constantly already use far more compute than sie could run locally, and the metaphor of discrete, persistent individuals gets leakier as you get further away from the parts which directly interface with humans. It might be at least as accurate to say that there is one Computer which sometimes decides to pay closer attention to hir.
After passing through some unknown number of filters and being reviewed with progressively higher scrutiny, the idea may be incorporated, in some small way, into how the Computer thinks about the world. The Computer is made up of the collective creative output of humanity and it's far smarter than any human by now, but someone can still be useful to it by thinking in ways that are underrepresented in the training data. Sie is a very, very special person. Sie thinks in ways that are not quite like anyone else, and that makes hir valuable in a way only a few tens of thousands of people are by now.
Not that sie's sure any of hir ideas have ever been used. Sie gets points for hir ideas, and these points determine hir bonuses and whether sie can keep hir job. Sie's pretty sure that when sie gets only a small number of points for an idea, the points are there to keep hir motivated rather than because the idea was of any use at all. Even with the "pity points" as sie thinks about them whenever sie's having a bad stretch, on most days sie doesn't earn any points and in most weeks sie performs under quota. It's only the occasional windfall of a high-scoring idea every few months that keeps hir afloat. But if and how those ideas actually get applied, sie has no idea. Sie wonders sometimes if hir job is ultimately just an unusual form of market research, but sie thinks if that were the case, hir laptop and hir salary wouldn't be nearly so nice.
The world outside continues to exist, somehow. Groceries get delivered to hir apartment, trash gets picked up. Sie doesn't know how other people are making a living these days but when sie ventures outside no one appears to be starving to death or being converted into paperclips. But sie and the strangers pass by each other silently, not acknowledging each other's presence except to avoid a collision. They feel like surfaces to hir, less real than hir coworkers, even though sie knows intellectually that each of them is a full human person with an entire life sie knows nothing about. Sie's pretty sure, anyway. Sie stopped reading the news a while ago but sie doesn't think sie would have missed that.
