My name is Gibraltar Pilot, and I am a Cybermentor. I teach IT systems to be more intelligent, or rather to utilize the AI that they already have. I am a machine guide and also a trouble shooter, but my main job is to act as a liaison between cybermanagement AI and the actual warm bodies that work for our firm.

When I was off work the other day, and I’d logged off (an old term) I really got to thinking about something. Of course, if I had not logged off I would not have gotten very far thinking about anything not work-related. Certainly not for very long. Even if I did the efficiency lapse would gone into this weeks stats and might eventually blight my overall score and deduct (albeit slightly) from my compensation. This was what I thought about: how did companies make a profit at all in the past, given how employees had such mental leeway during work hours?

In a way, it is difficult to think of a time when employees were really free to have any attitude and mindset they wanted at work, that is, if you’re thinking about from the owner’s point of view anyway. Imagine that employers were paying for work time in their very own workplaces and yet their employees mental energies could totally be directed elsewhere, wandering all over the place, daydreaming, whatever. How did these companies of the past make any profit? Well, they made money in spite of not having what employers now have at their disposal, and that is what most of us, the ones with the better jobs anyway, are all interfaced. Those old companies, “corporations”, as they were called, are the foundation of all that we have now. We still owe them a debt of gratitude, even if they were grossly inefficient.

As human-IT interface and communication advanced, little by little it became possible for us to know, not exactly what people think, their actual articulated thoughts (for that would be an invasion of privacy) but we did know exactly whether their mind was on work at any given moment and how hard they were doing that work. At first, such interface and monitoring equipment was intrusive and bulky and required the wearing of interface hardware, a “collar” they used to call it, although it was worn on the arms as well as part of the head and neck. Many considered it an insult to their dignity. So the technology got better and now an associate’s EMPLOYEE GUIDANCE INTERFACE can be imbedded under the skin anywhere above the armpits and they’re ready to go. This guidance system measures brainwaves and other forms of tell-tale energies emanating from the brain, central nervous system, and other organs such as the eyes and ears. No one is ever forced to have the implementation surgery.

Nowadays, when someone goes to work for a production facility, they’re work is supervised in a bio-technical sense and we know just how much they are actually working–and whether that coincides with measurable physical output–and with far few actual supervisors. Of course, it is illegal for IT and AI equipment to directly supervise a human being but they actually do much of the work and provide all the profiles of each associate. This is where I come in by teaching the AI to give me the information, associate profiles which are transmitted to an employee statistical system, an international network outside of interference from what is left of government, which all productive firms who subscribe can share.

What is an Employee Statistical Profile (ESP)? That of course can be reduced to a single number: Production Above Replacement, or PAR, and that is what any single hired worker can produce for a firm compared to the average productivity of workers in any given sector. While some consider that the most important statistic, there is much more to an associate profile than that. For example, we want to know, that even if an employee has an impressive PAR, she may or may be able to do even better given a gentle push. This employee may be a slow starter in the morning, so we monitor TPE, or Time to Peak Efficiency, so we know just how long it takes her to get up to her best and most productive at work. So that is part of our own job working with her; no electronic “prodding” or shocks or reminders from her EMPLOYEE GUIDANCE INTERFACE system, as many in the past imagined the system would be turn out to be–these detractors and critics were dead wrong about the humanity of our system. My job in particular, being a veteran (even though I never earned my MBA!) is to teach the AI how to guide our managers in their training of our associates. It might all seem a bit stilted in actual training sessions with our employees but the best managers, like me, give it the most human touch and can even make it funny. But the training strategy is all the AI’s. Legally and humanely, to be frank, you just need an actual warm body to do it. A lot of our training is done online, of course, as this seminar is, but no one is supervised by a machine, directly anyway.

Getting back to my employee example, the AI devises a training module on lowering her TPE and get her up to her best faster. We don’t stop at TPE as you all know. Sometimes our mental and physiological interfaces of our employees indicate that although they putting in a lot of effort given their cerebral hemispheric activity (I won’t get too technical here) and their metabolic functions on my display, they are just not getting a lot done. That is we also have output to effort levels the best of these being high indicated levels of metabolic and mental effort leading to good results for the firm. Everyone, at work anyway, really is an open book, to use a quaint expression. We know if their mind is on their work and their implanted devices show us exactly how much it is. We even know when your daydreaming and even if you are daydreaming about sex, although we know none of the details, nor should we.

In the past, a lot of workers daydreamed on the job or simply occupied their minds with thoughts irrelevant to their work on company time. This problem is getting closer and closer to being eradicated—you will have your “mind on your job”, as they used to say, and why anyone would want an economy full of people who didn’t is completely beyond me, as I’d implied in my introductory paragraph. That is why I love what I am doing. They used to talk about “making a difference” which was very vague and socialistic until we all really learned what mattered, and that is keeping our privately run and owned firms profitable as much as is humanely possible and this is the very driving force of our wealth in which everyone who plays a part has a part. I in fact do pretty good as my performance statistics are quite high . . . but, uh-hum, I digress.

Now we KNOW just how hard everybody who works works because of their Employment Statistical Profile. We know who are the best people to hire because of this ESP. But we cannot always hire the best ESPs because they are often more expensive and these people are more scarce than you can imagine. And we save a lot of funds in that we do not have to go through extensive hiring and interview processes as our predecessors did because our system is so much more to the point and an ESP tells you exactly who you are hiring.

Nowadays, we know exactly how much employees are giving, we quantify it and create a statistical profile of everyone in the workforce and everybody has learned to give it all they’ve got. They can’t help it now and they’re all the better for it both personally and financially! Another reason I firmly believe and what I am doing and why this program will help me do it even better is that we make individuals better: they learn how to concentrate and stay focused and that is a good in and of itself. Does that not in and of itself discredit the so-called intrusion and “de-humanization” accusations of critics and cranks past and present? No, we made people stronger and more able, even when they are not on company time. Besides, anyone can opt out of the ESP rating system at any time, albeit their personal employment prospects won’t be the best because the best employers are all integrated into the employment ratings system. Not only here but just about any other country to which they might move. It is truly a cross-border system who works hard and has a good rating–and your interface equipment does not lie–can make something of herself.

Earlier in the century and sometime afterward many were predicting the end of “work” and the advance of automation and robots and about how that was going to make the average person superfluous but all of that never came to pass. Except during downturns, we have very close to full employment. Work is here to stay. And it is kind of hard to admit because it is very strict but it all turned out for the better for everyone. To hang on to the ideas of the past would be the common ruin of us all. As we learned in business school: It is better, cheaper, and more profitable to society to automate the people themselves than to pay for the automation that will make them superfluous. Of course automation is in widespread use yet never to the point where it was imagined in the past. Can you imagine the costs to producers in society of so many unemployed? Nobody wanted to pay for the proposed guaranteed income and it came to be viewed as a form of theft from the producers and highly immoral anyway.

I apologize for going to much into my work and not of myself yet I am proud of both.

©2018, Jacinto Abril, All Rights Reserved