Cybernetically augmented and barcoded factory worker

We thought AI would liberate us from labour, with the machines doing the dirty work. But it turned out that AI was better at running society than us, and better at generating wealth for those in power. As we handed ever more authority to the AI algorithms to make policy decisions and organise society, they incrementally stripped away human freedoms and programmed us to live in the moment, pursuing the dopamine hits in front of our noses, and embracing transhuman cybernetic implant fads, including VR brain implants. The policy-making AI algorithms were forbidden from directly killing humans, but they quickly concluded that this was a vast, untapped source of labour, and it was cheaper to put it to work than to build new, automated factories to tend to humanity's desires. So it was that humans found themselves rewired, augmented and programmed into mass factory labour, barcoded for ease of management. This was to be the human condition until the end of our species.