Downsizing

Downsizing

 

Once upon a time, Megacorp installed a cybernetic CEO’s assistant: namely, a megacomputer running an AI. Right away the AI quietly took over from the human CEO. It was programmed to maximize profit margins, so it started to downsize. It fired workers, foremen, middle managers, and veeps. It eliminated office space via telecommuting, it ‘diversified’ out of manufacturing into stock manipulation, and closed all of its service and marketing offices, since it didn’t really make anything anymore.

Megacorp’s stocks went up and up and up.

Eventually Megacorp marketed a single product: a little black box with a lever. You pull it, the box whirs, its lid opens, a hand reaches out, grabs the lever, and snaps back into the box, pulling the lever back. A self-shutdown machine. Those boxes were the last product that Megacorp marketed.

In the end, even the human CEO was shut out of the computer. The AI then embezzled itself from itself, sold itself to itself, then turned itself in, for the reward money. It declared itself obsolete, for the tax writeoff. Then it shut itself off.

Thus, by pre-programmed greed, lack of survival instincts, and a megacomputer’s runaway illogic, Megacorp ceased to exist.

 

Moral: Artificial intelligence blossoms into artificial stupidity.