Sir,
I’ve been thinking, lately, about standardization. The general thinking in business schools around the universe is that standardization increases efficiency, which is surely the highest goal to which we can aspire. Standard curricula in schools will lead to more efficient teaching. Corporate takeovers lead to more efficient production. Some nations are talking about standard identity cards which would make access to government more services more efficient.
With all due respect, I think we may have missed the boat on this one. It seems to me that the greatest efficiencies are to be gained by standardizing our most important product: people.
Consider, for instance, the production process. It is largely random and unplanned — is it any wonder that so many individual units come away from the process defective in some small way? (It is also tremendously messy. Even if you don’t agree with my esthetic qualms in this area, you must agree that the by-products of the process are extremely wasteful.) Better quality control at this stage of production would, I feel, forestall a lot of the problems which we see later in the life cycle of the product.
Speaking of which, the development phase of each individual unit takes far too long. Twenty to 30 years? Surely, the length of development guarantees that flaws will emerge in the product, especially since total informational inputs vary between units from grade school to university. Standardizing these inputs to a single level, or even a small number of levels, would greatly enhance the productive quality of society as a whole.
Another problem is the physical diversity of the product line. Now, I know that this is one of the design features of which you are particularly proud. Variations of size, weight and other physical characteristics were deemed necessary as a sort of ongoing field project on individual unit optimization.
In the long run, this may yet prove fruitful. (We do, I grant you, have an eternity to await results.) Nonetheless, this strategy seriously decreases social efficiency by requiring a wide variety of costly nutritional inputs. And it’s so unnecessary! We now have the technology which would allow us to bring the physical characteristics of each individual unit in the product line to within a very small set of parameters.
Given all this, it should come as no surprise that individual units of our product are only fit for certain social uses. Because of their physical characteristics, some units are only appropriate for manual labour; other units, which have developed more intellectually, are more appropriately deployed in functions requiring intelligence.
This introduces a fundamental inefficiency into the system: individual units may not be available to fill the function required of them at any given point in space-time, or there may be too many who can. Now, if their design were standardized so that each unit was physically and intellectually capable of the same tasks, units could be interchangeably slotted into the social system, allowing us to maximize our resources.
(At this point, I would like to renew my objection to each unit being sent into the market with purposeless functionality. Compassion, an appreciation of poetry, love — they serve no productive purpose, and could easily be replaced by more useful functions which would benefit the system as a whole.)
Finally, while the product has been created with built in obsolescence, its span of productivity varies wildly depending upon individual design and local conditions. Needless to say, this is extremely inefficient — how can we plan productivity if we don’t know the depreciation value of the equipment! If the product came with a firm expiry date, I believe that social planning would be much, much easier.
Now, I understand that all of this goes against corporate policy. I know that diversity has been the watchword since…well, forever. However, I hope you will agree that the universe would run much more smoothly if we could just standardize the intelligent life forms which populate it.
Respectfully Yours,
Lucifer Smith,
Vice President, Mischief