I Can’t Wait For The Robots To Start Running Things
By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
The Gov’t Works No Worse Than Any Other Large Organization
People love to complain about the government, as if the government was the only organization that’s messed up. Wake up! Most big organizations are as screwed up as the government.
Do you think your college or hospital bureaucracy works any better than your local building department? Have you ever worked for an insurance company or a bank? Do you think Wells Fargo is run better than the average department of motor vehicles? Well, it’s not.
Are you going to tell me that GM or VW are models of bureaucratic efficiency? Maybe Enron?
Stop pretending that the government is the problem and that if we just took everything away from the government then stuff would run better.
Please.
Everything would be just as bad, maybe worse.
The Source Of The Problems Is Always People
Hardware doesn’t run companies, institutions or government agencies. People do.
It wasn’t the Zerox machines or the laser printers that made the Catholic church cover up for pedophiles.
People did that.
It wasn’t the navigation gear on the Costa Concordia that crashed the ship. People did that.
Is the VA a mess because the AC or the elevators weren’t working right? No, it was people who screwed the pooch.
Watergate? People!
Subprime mortgage meltdown? People!
Let’s face it, when things are screwed up it’s almost always because some sub-prime human beings have screwed things up.
A Lesson From George Carlin
George Carlin used to say: “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”
His only mistake was that he didn’t mention their ability to fuck things up when in small groups or acting alone.
Carlin had a routine that was both funny and heart-breakingly true.
It went something like this:
Think about how stupid the average person is and then realize that half of the population is dumber than that.
Once you get past the stupid people, then you have to deal with the ones who are full of shit.
“He’s fairly intelligent, but he’s full of shit.”
If you manage to survive the dummies and get past the ones who are full of shit, then you run head on into the guys who are fucking nuts.
Seriously now, think about it. You start out with one-hundred adults. At least thirty of them are really stupid. So now you’re down to seventy.
Eliminate the ones who have no common sense at all. Down to sixty.
Eliminate the ones who are lazy, mean, liars, or don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves. What’s left? Maybe forty?
Now take out the ones who are crazy, on drugs or alcoholics. If you’re lucky you’ve still got twenty-five left.
Now, from that bunch, select out the people who are hard workers, self-starters, creative, decent, caring, generous and pretty smart. How many does that leave you? Ten?
Why Your Boss Is Likely The Problem
Now suppose you have to run something, a company, a small business, a university, a city, county or state government agency, anything. Your random odds of getting one of the good ones as your boss are maybe 10%, but managers, bosses and supervisors are not chosen randomly.
They are chosen by the rules of bureaucratic advancement. Who’s top notch at blaming their mistakes on others, taking credit for other’s successes, handing off problems to others and letting the problem sink them, kissing ass, reading and manipulating other people, lying really well, and so forth?
The odds are 90% that the people who are really good at that stuff are in the group of dummies, crazies and guy/gals who are full of shit.
That means that there’s about one chance in a hundred that one of the good ones will actually end up as your boss, Congressman, governor, CEO, provost, or whatever, and 99% that at some level your organization will be more or less under the control of someone whom you wouldn’t voluntarily put in charge of walking your dog.
And it doesn’t take many of those 90% sub-optimal people to totally screw up any organization. One of the good ones could spend a week in almost any organization and come out with a Hit List of employees whose termination would improve the company’s operations by at least half.
Jerry — lazy, hates to work, hides in his office screwing around on the Internet all day. GONE.
Sally — who’s in charge of creating the invoices, couldn’t organize a bowl of corn flakes and milk. GONE.
Ralph — the warehouse shift manager who is both really stupid and really, really lazy. GONE.
The problem is that the odds of actually getting the right person on site to do that job are, again, one in ten. The odds of getting management to actually fire the morons, one in five. The odds of management actually hiring good, competent people to replace Jerry, Sally and Ralph are one in a hundred.
It’s a losing game. Now. But not when the robots take over.
The Answer — Let The Robots Do It
Here’s the thing about AI. Once they get the system down, once they crack the code, it’s scalable. Once they’re able to create a system that’s almost smart enough to manage people, getting it smart enough after that to super manage people is just going to be a matter of scaling up the hardware.
You run the AI system in the cloud and use a relatively dumb bot front end. The bot will be some variation of those robot mall security gizmos that wander around looking for kids who’ve lost a shoe.
The manager bot doesn’t need sophisticated hands, arms and legs. All it needs to be able to do is roll around the building and see well enough to avoid running into walls. It would have super face recognition software running up in the cloud so it would know every employee’s name, position, duties, etc.
All the computing would be in the cloud with the bot just doing the front-end interaction with the employees.
Why The Robot Is Better
Think of the advantages of having an AI bot Supervisor.
- It would have access to the best body language software so it would know when people were lying to it.
- It would never act out of anger or favoritism.
- Sexual issues would be nonexistent.
- It would never get tired, be impatient, lose its temper, or go home.
- It would have instant access to all the data so it would know which shipments went out and which ones didn’t. Who clocked in late or stayed late? Who was lying about the real problem with the Benchbarrel order?
- And it would know how to manage people. It would know all the rules and techniques of how to handle employee conflicts, how to motivate workers, the best strategies on how to deal with drug problems, empire building, procrastination, buck passing, and lots more.
Think of the tasks that a good supervisor is supposed perform — monitoring each subordinate’s performance, detecting mistakes, initiating corrective training, instituting check lists and quality control procedures, revising the paperwork flow, etc.
Give the bot a wi-fi link to the cloud and turn it loose. In a couple weeks Jerry, Sally and Ralph will be barely a memory. No more paperwork bottlenecks. No more cover-ups. Once the Robot Managers prove themselves, the sky’s the limit.
For The Next Step I Guess We’ll Need To Amend The Constitution
We all know what the next step after that is. Today, General Motors, tomorrow Governor RJ687B, Mark Nine. After that all we need to do is correct a few little flaws in the Constitution and it will be Congressman, Senator or, dare I say it? President RJ687B, Mark Nine.
No more Watergate, Whitewater, Iran/Contra, Russian hanky-panky or pussy grabbing.
No, instead it will be, “The electric socket is right over there, Mr. President.”
I can’t wait.
You think I’m kidding. Go ahead, ask me if my choice was between RJ687B and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, which one I would pick as my President.
It’s isn’t even a close call. Not by a mile.
– David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
