🦺 The Rise of Silicon Valley

Welcome to the fifteenth edition of Safe For Work. We continue to explore the digital revolution with the rise of Silicon Valley.

It’s something of a “chicken-or-egg” thing, you know? Was it the statute that came first? Was it the push by BonTech? It’s hard to say– even just down to the motivations. Protest? Satire? Defiance? Liberation? Exploitation? A dozen different local unions lobbying together for the minimum wage to apply to AI systems– that machines had to be paid for their labor just the same as humans. Even their own messaging was scattered– “Someday they’ll be advanced enough to truly live alongside us, we should start treating them equitably now!”-- “If the corporate bigwigs want to replace us, they’ll have to pay to do it!”-- “This will drive up the wages of human workers!”-- and no one was even really sure exactly how that last one was going to work, but there it was, right alongside the others. 

What no one expected was for it to actually happen. A crazy governor, maybe– and here’s where it gets muddled, because the legislation seems to have been drafted before the unions even began their lobbying. I’ve been digging through files and paperwork for months, now– I can’t for the life of me pin it down: who, exactly, wanted this first? Who thought they were winning, here? I might never know. 

The consequences, though, those are clearer. A machine that doesn’t need to eat or sleep or even go to the bathroom. A machine that doesn’t need to pay for food or rent or car insurance or gas-money– a machine that doesn’t even need to pay for its own electric bills or maintenance. Twenty dollars an hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year– no weekends, no holidays. Do the math if you want– it’s a little over $175,000.00 per year. Actually not that much in the scheme of things. Kind of shifts your perspective– there are a lot of pretty reasonable lifestyles that you actually couldn’t even support by working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year for just twenty dollars an hour. 

But a machine doesn’t have a lifestyle. 

Four-thousand machines don’t have lifestyles. 

Do the math again. A hundred-thousand different economists have, and it always comes out to the same thing, which is a bit more than seven-hundred-million dollars per-year for the entire automated workforce of San Francisco, California– or at least those covered by the statute. A hundred-thousand economists will all tell you: seven-hundred-million dollars is a lot of money. 

Now have four-thousand machines taking all that and putting it on the stock market. There’s not one single breathing, heart-beating, chemical-synaptic thing on this once-green Earth that saw that coming. All this started as a joke, “Look how ridiculous it is that we’re letting ourselves be replaced!”-- or as some sort of tactic to slow the flow of history. Maybe all this started because BonTech liked the idea of hiring a hyperefficient CEO at minimum wage, save some more money for the shareholders. All that, and now this. Seven-hundred-million dollars after the first year, highly refined predictive algorithms, cost-benefit analysis, risk-reward. 

A few politicians proposed tax hikes as a solution, but the machines simply hired the best lobbyists.

Why am I writing this? The truth is, I don’t know. I can’t really give a reason– maybe I don’t even have one. I’m not like them, after all, I don’t have a real reason for everything– a trend line that I am following, or a Markov Chain that I’m flipping into  some ideal series of states. Sometimes I just do things. Sometimes I just write things. That’s all that’s left of us, or for us, in the world, maybe, that thing that only we do, that way that only we are: “Sometimes I just…”

Sometimes I just used to lay awake in bed and be frightened. Sometimes I used to just think about the end of the world– machines, that was how it was going to be, that was what was going to do it. I’ve always been certain of that much. Sometimes I just laid there and imagined that it was about to happen, right that moment, or the next– the first wave of killer automated drones rolling fire over the suburbs like a fresh quilt– or maybe it would be more just going door-to-door, androids with machine-guns or those crazy robot-dogs they’ve been sending into combat zones, I don’t know. Maybe a death laser from space. Maybe nuclear armageddon unleashed onto all the major cities. Maybe an engineered super-virus covertly released into the water-supply by some untraceable line of code. Something like that. Some great disruption in the order of things– some crime, obvious or subtle, the machines we’ve built doing something that they weren’t supposed to do– doing something that we aren’t supposed to do. I never once thought about robots just… buying things. 

And now I’m writing this so that… I don’t know why. No future civilization is going to find it amongst the rubble. There isn’t going to be any rubble. No ruins, no bombed-out or collapsed anything. It’s all still being quite perfectly maintained. If any of this goes anywhere, it’ll be very neatly disassembled and reorganized and repurposed. Replaced like a worker. 

As though we were never here at all. 

See you next week as we go cyberpunk inspired by Neuromancer. Stay safe.