More of The same

2024-11-22

This was written in anger when reading the description of the event “Genève 2040: L’odyssée des entreprises vers la transition” at the “Semaine du Climat 2024” organized by the city.

Now that I read it, it is clearly inspired from “Professeur Jung”, a very funny weekly column in the Vigousse Swiss satirical.

I’m aware of the concept of “straw man” but do you see any criticism here? It’s only praise! Leftwing catnip? What are you talking about?

I can’t wait for 2040.

Imagine this. Today we are only seeing the begining of things. Automatic deductions on workers pay when they go to the toilets, a laugh detector, using a microphone to detect when someone is laughing in the work place and send a funny meme when below management-mandated standards, remote workplace policing tools checking if employees are working or slacking.

But, even with just today’s technology we can do better, much better. The purpose of the laughs is to keep an optimal level of serotonin. Why use laughs to measure and optimize the hormone levels of your workers, when a hypodermic syringe does the same, but with much more precision? A smart watch and a needle, and you can throw your “LOL-box” away! Why just monitor the toilet usage? Instead, have a pressure detector on the employee’s chair and use this for hour billing. They might cheat? Well, add some sort of IR detector, or bill by keyboard usage, there are ways.

This system is innescepable. After all, only the most efficient companies survive. So how could we possibly tolerate any but the most efficient employees? If we don’t do it now, the Chineses will do it, and we will innevitably have to do it anyway, as they chip away at our margins.

But that’s not all. Why limit our system of command and control to the workplace? It is the duty of the employees to be fresh for work. A drunkard coming at work every day barely able to do anything; someone who spent the night bingeing the last Netflix series, barely able to hold on their two legs. It is unfair that we should pay the careless slacker as much as the productive worker that spend their unpaid time making sure they are fit for work!

It’s not like we don’t already have the data. Netflix has a database of every user watch times, as Amazon has of every reader’s time spent reading (with per-page details). Same with Visa and Mastercard, already selling their clients transaction history to Google. It’s just a question of putting it to good use.

What are you reading? Ezra Klein? You stay! Naomi Klein? You are fired! Nothing? Promoted!

We could create the perfect economic system, where everyone’s behavior can be perfectly calibrated with a system of incentives and punitions in the behaviorist tradition. So that everyone’s economic output can be optimized to the max and finally attain the perfectly efficient economy. Each hour of the day, each breath, each neural pathway attuned and guided by the invisible hand!

In fact, the only reason this is not the case today is the human irrationality – so-called “empathy”, or “privacy”. Some may suggest that what I’m describing here is “totalitarian” or “inhuman”. But the true crime against humanity is to not optimize profits, the sole way to improve the human condition. Regardless, it’s innescepable, it’s the fate of humanity to become the cog in the ultimate machine: market equilibrium.

But that’s not all. This is only the worst case scenario, if technology fails to improve and stays at current day levels. We have AI. Currently crude and extremely energy hungry. Surely they will improve. If they improve we can imagine this: everything that today is intermediated by a computer (video, text, email, powerpoints, reports, monitoring, news) could be done by the computer. No more need to rely on pesky little artists or copywirters, just ask the machine to do it and it’s here.

But why stop at that point? We all know computers are par excellence the best at stiffing through data. A mere human simply can’t compete. Why is one to stiff through data? In short, for decision making. No more data analyst required, you just ask the machine to go through the data and make a decision about it. A human can’t compete, it will simply be the best decision possible.

In fact, why not set the whole agenda by it? Today AIs are good enough to build romantic relations with humans. If the AI can have a romantic relation, it certainly can have a business relation, and at a scale no human possibly can. The computer, having no personal drive, unlike a man, cannot be bribed. No inconscious bias either. The role of the CEO (the most expensive) is thus automated.

Unlike a man – who is sollely driven by emotions – a computer can focus on the sole thing that truly matters: profits. It is common sense that profit maximisation at the expense of everything else is the only way to improve the common good. Today’s corporations are only a band-aid to convert emotional drive into profit optimisation, tomorow’s computer will not need this wasteful mascarade, it can directly strive for efficiency without having to go through the impure and irrational medium of human subjectivity, only computational objectivity will prevail.

But if we have a computer run the company, why not have it run ALL the companies? After all, the only purpose of the free market is to “turn greed into the common good”, but if greed is out of the equation, isn’t competition just a waste of resources?

With AIs at the top, there is no need to invite federal judges to expensive resorts to educate them on the benefits of profits, nor for cushy sinecures for retired lawmakers who bravely fought for the right laws despite populist pressures. All will be made according to the golden rule: optimize profits. And not even one human will have a say in the matter. Society will be organized in the most efficient and therefore naturally ordained way. The rulers will be rulers not by random chance, but because he happened to be the exactly most optimal person to put in this position. The slave will be glad to be slave, because that’s his AI-ordained position in society, he knows – unlike today’s slave – that even the thought of independence is blasphemy against maximal utility.

We need to bow down to our tech leaders and embrace this beautifully optimal future. Don’t you want every bone of your body to be connected to the net, every muscle of your body aware of what is the most efficient course of action? Don’t you want people who undermine global prosperity to be punished for not optimizing profit? Don’t you want your hormonal level, your mood, be optimized for optimal integration into the job market? What’s not to love?

Why not start now? Let’s accept our position in society, let’s accept that indeed the unhoused deserve to be unhoused, the famished, famished. We live in a society driven by profit, therefore starvation is their just destiny. Don’t try to fit our work to our human needs, instead we should fit our human needs to our work environment.