by GIDEON GINRACHMANJINJa-VITUS, Alternate Reality News Service Economics Writer
Seren Dipitous spent most of her time writing memos that she never sent. Piotr Goode-Book perfected his paper shuffling technique. Jemaine Germain hunkered down in his cubicle and hoped nobody would notice him playing YoursOursMineCraft and taking long naps.
AI is hell on middle managers.
Ordinarily, the Tort Inured Trio would spend their mornings in meetings and their afternoons in creating minutes, memos and memorabilia (Goode-Book was especially adept at family albums and Germain was an expert quilter) arising out of the business of the meetings. These days, ordinarily is just so much splortched bug goo on the windshield of corporate management.
Managerial OmniServices, a wholly owned and wholly adorable subsidiary of MultiNatCorp (“We do…well, just about everything, really, stuff”), has developed an artificial intelligence that can take the place of the middle of the org (which stands for “Oh, Righteous Gentlemen!”) chart. The official designation of the project is 808NT0M; the unofficial designation is Bob and Tom.
“Management: the final frontier,” intoned Ned Feeblish, Vice President Communications and Corporate Machinations for MultiNatCorp (“What more is there to say about all the stuff we do, really?”). He looked around his specious office (it had lots of personality, just none of it his), but no heroic music seemed to be forthcoming, so he continued: “Our programmers realized that if we could find a way to AIize middle management, the company could realize huge financial savings. What’s not to love?”
“You want a list?” Dipitous said with a sigh. “I remember when I used to make lists. It seems like yesterday.” When I pointed out that Bob and Tom had only been brought online twelve hours earlier, she responded, “Have you ever read one of my memos? They were known for their precision and lack of metaphorical specifocity. They were – *SOB* – a thing of beauty!”
The program, which generates six middle managers with differently weighted priorities to debate every angle of every issue, had been fed with the minutes of every MultiNatCorp meeting (except for the secret meetings of the corporate neuromancers, of course, because nobody knows they exist). It is then given a prompt with all of the pressing issues to be addressed.
Given that computer programs work at light speed, MultiNatCorp engineers expected meetings to last milliseconds. SPOILER ALERT: they didn’t. Or, to be more precise, it didn’t. The first meeting has been going on for centuries of virtual time, with no end in sight.
“Yeeeaaaaahh,” Feeblish enthused unenthusiastically, “we may not have thought that through as well as we should have. I will say that, employing it at Managerial OmniServices seemed like a good idea at the time…”
The original plan was to redundantize almost the entire middle management of the company once the first Bob and Tom meeting was successfully concluded. “Boooooooo!” Germain responded to the news. However, with no end in sight, the implementation of Bob and Tom may actually give the company’s middle managers job security they didn’t have before. “Yaaaaaaay!” Germain responded to the news. “What can I say? Reactive is my management style.”
Access to Bob and Tom’s stream indicates that every issue, every word of every issue, is debated to a degree that middle managers can only envy. But that’s not the only thing keeping the meeting going.
At one point, the committee members appear to have become stuck in a recursive loop:
MuskRat> I move to table motion 3-2-7-8-4-9-9-9-8-2 Charlie.
ThielSqueal> I move to table the move to table motion 3-2-7-8-4-9-9-9-8-2 Charlie.
MuskRat> I move to table the move to table the move to table motion 3-2-7-8-4-9-9-9-8-2 Charlie.
ThielSqueal> I move to table the move to table the move to table the move to table motion 3-2-7-8-4-9-9-9-8-2 Charlie.
This went back and forth for the computer equivalent of 79 years. Eventually, the loop was broken when CrowBlows> interrupted with a motion to adjourn for a coffee break. Three milliseconds later, the meeting was back on track.
Feeblish is bullish about the work Bob and Tom is doing. “Sure, we may have had a hiccup,” he allowed. “A…long and…painful hiccup. But at the end of it all, Bob and Tom could come up with a path forward that would allow MultiNatCorp to dominate the economic landscape for the next ten thousand years!”