Boss Hog’s Automated Empire
Boss Hog dimmed the conference room lights.
“Llama,” he said, “I have solved the economy.”
Llama shifted in her chair. Her back hurt from serving coffee all day on her feet.
The first bright bold blue PowerPoint slide read:
AI. AUTOMATION. ROBOTS.
Beneath it:
A WORLD WITHOUT FRICTION.
Llama opened her notebook she’d been required to carry in along with a clicky pen. He needed her to PAY ATTENTION TO HIM! It made him look important, and looking important mattered the most to him.
She had a few ideas about that. She also had a few ideas about automation and AI. Shorter working days. Affordable homes. Time to enjoy being alive. Automation should bring lowering costs across the economy. AI could be life assisting.
But there was a problem.
“Employees,” Boss Hog began, “are our largest burden and obstacle.”
“Aging employees. Untrained employees. Unstable employees,” he looked pointedly at her. Tell someone to fuck off, and here you wind up. In a small conference room, in a nightmare, with your tormentor.
She held her pause. Any reaction was a tool for him and the badgers. She had earned that lesson. Her back still hurt. A tooth had cracked because of grinding her teeth. Fuck.
“EMPLOYEES,” Boss Hog continued, “are not a resource. They require wages, health care, housing. You feed them today, they need feeding tomorrow. Eventually they need medical things. I’m healthy as a horse.”
A horse outside snorted.
“Living things need things. Quality of life impacts their needs,” said Llama. “Life is full of demands and friction to meet those demands.”
“Exactly. Employees don’t scale up! Their output is finite and reductive. Their input is pointless. And their needs only increase. See where I am going with this Llama? They scale only DOWN.”
“But if you address quality of life…” Llama tried to interrupt.
He clicked the clicker. So satisfying.
THE FULLY AUTOMATED WORKFORCE.
Robot miners. Robot drivers. Robot factories making more robots. An AI manager congratulating another AI manager.
He loved the little animation. He chuckled to himself. He always had made new employees make PowerPoints for him, then rejected them, and used his own. Psychological dominance needed to be established right at the beginning. He was so smart. He was going to miss the days of torturing employees. Making secretaries cry had been a favorite ego boost.
But no more. Evolution was at hand. ECONOMIC REVOLUTION! TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION! HIS EVOLUTION!
“AI Bots. No salaries. No sick days. No one asking to attend a funeral. No offices! lol No mental health needs. That was an insane one. You know you can’t weigh or measure mental health? Does anyone even know if it really exists?”
“When will this new economy of yours be ready?”
“Soon. In my lifetime.”
Boss Hog failed to understand he was no longer in a body but was himself consciousness transferred into a global network.
“And until then?”
“Everyone needs to work harder to finance the transition. It’s very important this transition.”
“I thought transitions were bad and against the One Truth?”
“We are transitioning to employees’ inevitable replacement.”
“That is our shared future.”
A smiling employee handed a wrench to a robot. The robot handed the employee a watch. The next animation removed the employee and replaced him with a sailboat.
“Who buys what the robots make?” asked Llama.
“Consumers.”
“The employees you removed?”
Boss Hog didn’t blink. He was beyond blinking.
“We’re moving beyond consumer dependence.”
He clicked.
MINERALS. CHEMICALS. BOMBS.
“High-ticket items. Serious customers.”
“Who buys the minerals?”
“Manufacturers.”
“Making what?”
“Products.”
“For whom?”
Boss Hog tapped the screen.
“We’ve moved beyond that question.”
He clicked.
THE AUTOMATED EMPIRE.
“The Ottoman Empire?” asked Llama.
“No, Llama. AUTOMATED. Please stop bringing history into this. You know why I hate that.”
A world map appeared in three colors.
“This region is for WAR. This region is for DEVELOPMENT. This region is for EXTRACTION.”
“Who lives there?”
“That isn’t the layer we’re displaying.”
He unchecked POPULATIONS.
“Much clearer.”
“What happens when the war spreads into the development region?”
“Reconstruction contracts.”
“Who pays?”
“The people there.”
“With what?”
“Their resources.”
“Which you’re extracting.”
“An integrated model.”
“And if they object?”
He pointed to the war region.
Llama looked down at her notebook.
Less friction, she had written.
“Your plan makes lives harder.”
“ONLY during the transition. No pain no gain.”
“And it gives them fewer choices.”
“We need a dependable up-scalable workforce.”
“Until you don’t need a workforce.”
“No no no. You llamas are dumb and crazy. Listen, EMPLOYEES is not the same as WORKFORCE any longer.”
He jumped back, did a Ta Dah! gesture and clicked his clicky.
He loved being a hologram. He had abs and pecs and the jaw line of a god.
The big blue screen glowed.
A FLEXIBLE HUMAN BRIDGE TO AN AUTOMATED FUTURE.
The remaining workers were labeled TEMPORARY CONTRACTORS.
“Do they choose their hours?” asked Llama.
“No.”
“Can they refuse unsafe work?”
“No.”
“Can they work for someone else?”
“Not under the agreement.”
“Whose flexibility is it?”
He clicked.
LIMITED LIABILITY.
“They acknowledge that I have no responsibility for their conditions and may release them at any time.”
“Can they release you?”
“They have obligations.”
“And you?”
“I have a vision.”
And sexy biceps.
On the screen, an exhausted animal received a notification from the company’s AI wellness platform.
REMEMBER TO BREATHE.
“Could that animal go home?” asked Llama.
“She could apply for time off after she verbally requested it from her supervisor. I don’t know. I had employees but it wasn’t my job to manage or supervise them. That was always someone else’s. It didn’t concern me. Anyway. Listen, we’re behind schedule.”
Boss Hog clicked.
ELIMINATING GOVERNMENT INTERFERENCE.
Taxes, inspections, safety standards, and public hearings disappeared beneath a large red line.
“Always another demand,” he said. “Clean water. Schools. Hospitals. They hate success. I take that personally. You know they weaponized regulations. So we weaponized them right back. Now everything is broken. Nothing works.”
“Those things you broke, they kept your workforce alive.”
“Not really. They were alive before all this existed. We made a mistake creating civilizations at first but we self corrected with capitalism and corporations. But each great leap requires cheap labor and unlimited resources and eliminating regulation - war and crime and death have been the most efficient for us. But PR around that and Marketing is a bear. But now we’ll have…”
He tapped the slide show screen, smiled magnanimously, “robots making robots while extracting from Mars.”
“But till you get to that, who buys your bombs?”
“Governments.”
“The ones you want out of your way?”
“I need purchasing departments. The rest is overhead.”
He clicked.
AI-OPTIMIZED GOVERNMENT.
An AI approved a budget. Another awarded Boss Hog the contract. A third transferred public money into his account.
“Who tells the AI what to buy?”
“I do.”
“Who sets the price?”
“I do.”
“Could the purchasing AI refuse?”
“Why would I program that?”
“Could the people refuse?”
“They can submit feedback.”
“Would that change anything?”
“Then it wouldn’t be automated. But it does allow us to document who is a problem.”
All the arrows on the slide led to Boss Hog.
“What happens when people have no money left?” Llama asked.
“Credit.”
“When they can’t repay?”
“We raise limits.”
“And you want them to repay?”
“Eventually we get to asset acquisition.”
“When you own their assets?”
“Rent.”
“When they can’t pay rent?”
“Llama, I cannot be responsible for everyone.”
He clicked.
MARS: COMPLETE INDEPENDENCE. EARTH: THEIR PROBLEM.
Above the planet floated a magnificent private residence, a mega mega mansion. MMMs.
Robot servants maintained it. Robot miners worked below. AI managed his investments, approved his contracts, directed his armies, and reported his increasing wealth.
“No regulations,” he said softly. “No demands. Infinite resources. Self maintaining workforce scalable recyclable and without liabilities.”
“No animals?”
“Precisely.”
Llama studied the picture.
He had been supplied with so much, for so long, that the supplying had become invisible to him. Breakfast appeared. Roads existed. Someone had educated the engineers. Someone kept the water drinkable. People in other countries worked, bought, built, repaired, and paid the taxes that became his contracts. He extracted whatever he wanted from somewhere and he didn’t care who or how. And somewhere bombs were bought, but bombs like military machinery were pointless if not used, so there was always war somewhere to be waged. In the transition time.
He called all of it independence. Freedom was the reduction and then elimination of liability.
The economy, Llama thought, was something civilization constructed to provision a shared lifestyle. It had then been scaled, split, and leveraged against some of the very animals it had been promised to serve. Instead of helping correct this misalignment, Boss Hog had used its advantages to insulate himself from the shared life. Employees’ well-being threatened his freedom, narrowed his profit margins, and limited his scalability. He wanted to replace them with an automated scalable workforce whose needs would never compete with his agendas.
His slides retained only extraction, consumption, ownership, and ways to avoid the consequences. He was a genius!
Even now, while living creatures wore themselves out building his escape, their lives appeared nowhere in his projections.
“How long is the transition?” she asked.
“As long as it takes.”
“And what happens to everyone during it?”
“My AI is modeling several scenarios.”
“Are any of them good?”
“For me certainly. You, not so good.”
He paused.
“Really don’t understand why you don’t try harder. I provided you with a coffee shop.”
Llama shifted in her chair and unclenched her jaw.
Her health insurance, gas, and groceries had all increased along with her credit line. Her car payment competed with her rent payment competed with her insurance payment competed with her credit payment. Coffee beans and utilities had almost doubled. Badgers had run off a sizable number of customers and spread rumors about pest control problems on Fakebook and Twatterverse. Boss Hog had bought a smear campaign against her so she was no longer employable at traditional jobs. It cost less than his last golfcart. AI was a real miracle worker.
Llama looked again at the floating mansion.
The thought occurred to her, he could spend eternity up there, surrounded by agreeable machines, mining dead planets and conducting wars on an enormous screen all on servers firewalled from anything on Earth. His AI could supply endless opponents, endless resources, endless numbers going up.
We don’t need him. He freed us from him accidentally.
Down here, people might have an afternoon off, if someone could distract Boss Hog from world domination on Earth.
Earth was of course limited in resources and lousy with employees.
“Would you leave sooner,” she asked, “if we helped?”
Boss Hog brightened.
“You’d support the mission?”
Llama opened her notebook to a fresh page.
“I think all the leaders of the free world would happily co-sign a loan for this venture.”
“You know for a coffee shop llama, you are finally showing your potential. I just needed you to be another yes man all this time.”
“I’m sorry Boss Hog. I really thought my independence was self actualization and my animal right. I forgot your needs.”
Boss Hog teared up.
She was like the daughter he never wanted and the wife he had divorced.
Llama’s back hurt more and the dark clouds of her nightmare started to break. The clicking pen and the slide advancing clicker was actually her grinding teeth. The chair was just a tangle of her bed sheets.
She woke up, she wasn’t operating a failing coffeeshop. She was going for a hike with the mouse and a mongoose.
She decided no more BNN before bedtime and no more spicy ramen for dinner.
