Marshall Brain: Manna

At the supercenter, Brian said that Manna was now tracking how fast employees walked from point A to point B in the store, and if you did not walk fast enough Manna would warn you about it. It was just like working on an assembly line, where they could speed up the line to make people work faster. But now the assembly line was everywhere, and if you didn’t keep up you knew that you would be blacklisted nationwide.

The most surprising part of the Manna system, however, was the effect it had on wages. As Manna spread to so many businesses, your choice was to work for Manna or to be unemployed. When you started to work for Manna, it paid you minimum wage. There was no reason for it to pay you any more — your choice was minimum wage or zero. There was no way to ask Manna for a raise. You could quit, but when you quit you would be applying to another business that used Manna. It was going to give you minimum wage too.

This was the societal power of Manna, and the basic equation was pretty simple. You could take the job for minimum wage, or you could be unemployed making zero. At any moment Manna could replace you with another warm body, and that meant that you did what you were told for minimum wage or you got fired. Manna, and the corporations that used it, knew that that was the equation. There were plenty of unemployed people who would take your spot as soon as you left.

The effect of Manna was to stratify out all the minimum wage workers in America. At the bottom you had the people who were unemployable. They had screwed up and been blacklisted by Manna. They were back living with their parents or sleeping on the sofa with a friend. You could get yourself un-blacklisted, but if you got blacklisted more than a couple times, you were dead.

Then there were all the unemployed people. Between Manna improving efficiency and forcing out the managers, plus overseas outsourcing taking out white collar jobs, plus machines like the automated checkout lines and burger flippers coming on line and so on, there were plenty of people who were unemployed. Unemployed people went around all day applying to jobs. But in a sense, that was pointless. All of the interconnected Manna systems knew every single person in the job pool. Manna also knew the performance of every single person who had ever worked in the system. You were in an incredibly bad spot if you were unemployed.

Then there were all the people being managed by Manna. They all made minimum wage. If you were wearing a headset at work you were making minimum wage and everyone knew it. And everyone knew that if you did not do what Manna told you to do, as fast as Manna told you to do it, you would be unemployed and making nothing.

And then there was everyone else — the doctors, lawyers, accountants, office workers, executives, politicians. The executives and politicians made a ton of money and they were never going to be wearing headsets. Joe Garcia at Burger-G was making $100 million per year and flaunting it like a rock star.

And Manna was starting to move in on some of the white collar work force. The basic idea was to break every job down into a series of steps that Manna could manage. No one had ever realized it before, but just about every job had parts that could be subdivided out.

HMOs and hospitals, for example, were starting to put headsets on the doctors and surgeons. It helped lower malpractice problems by making sure that the surgeon followed every step in a surgical procedure. The hospitals could also hyper-specialize the surgeons. For example, one surgeon might do nothing but open the chest for heart surgery. Another would do the arterial grafts. Another would come in to inspect the work and close the patient back up. What this then meant, over time, was that the HMO could train technicians to do the opening and closing procedures at much lower cost. Eventually, every part of the subdivided surgery could be performed by a super-specialized technician. Manna kept every procedure on an exact track that virtually eliminated errors. Manna would schedule 5 or 10 routine surgeries at a time. Technicians would do everything, with one actual surgeon overseeing things and handling any emergencies. They all wore headsets, and Manna controlled every minute of their working lives.

That same hyper-specialization approach could apply to lots of white collar jobs. Lawyers, for example. You could take any routine legal problem and subdivide it — uncontested divorces, real estate transactions, most standard contracts, and so on. It was surprising where you started to see headsets popping up, and whenever you saw them you knew that the people were locked in, that they were working every minute of every day and that wages were falling.

A decade later I was getting out of school. I had a BA in education and a master’s degree in educational administration. My plan was to teach in high school for two or three years so that I had experience “in the trenches”, and then move into an administrative or government position. I was ready to start teaching and I was looking forward to it. Education was one area that, so far, had been largely untouched by Manna, so in that sense I was lucky. I was also lucky that there were jobs available, and I did not have a lot of problems finding an open position. That was a miracle.

My graduation year was an important year for me — I had been working at Burger-G all through school to make spending money, and now I would have my first real job free from Manna.

But it turned out to be a pivotal year for America as a whole. It was a funny coincidence. My graduation year was the year that computer vision came of age.

No one really thought of the Manna software as a robot at all. To them, Manna was just a computer program running on a PC. When most normal people thought about robots, they thought about independent, autonomous, thinking robots like the ones they saw in science fiction films. C-3PO and R2-D2 were powerful robotic images, and people would not believe they were looking at a robot until robots looked like C-3PO.

The mechanical chassis for a C-3PO type robot had been around since the turn of the century. Honda did the trailblazing with its ASIMO robot, and once Honda had proven the concept many other manufacturers followed Honda’s lead. ASIMO could walk up and down stairs, kick a ball and so on, and it looked completely natural. The problem was that ASIMO needed a human operator pushing a joystick to tell it what to do.

The thing that held robots back was vision. Nearly everything a person does is aided by vision — so much so that we take vision completely for granted. But if you close your eyes and try to do anything, you realize just how important vision is.

For example, when you enter a room where the light is dim, you think in your head, “I need to turn on the lights.” You use your eyes to look on the wall for a light switch. When you find it you use your eyes to guide your hand to the switch. You then use your eyes to figure out what kind of switch it is. Is it a toggle switch? A push-button switch? A dimmer switch with a knob? A dimmer switch with a slider? None of the above? Once you figure it out, you use your eyes to guide your fingers to manipulate the switch in the appropriate way. Or maybe you look at the wall and there is no switch to be found. Now you start looking for a lamp in the room. Is it a touch lamp? Or is the switch on the base of the lamp? Maybe the switch is near the bulb, and you have to push it or twist it or pull a chain… Your vision guides you every step of the way. It is nearly impossible to do anything in a complex environment without vision. And turning on a lamp is a very simple thing. It gets a lot more complicated when you are trying to run through a forest, ride your bicycle down a busy a street or find your way to a particular address in a large subdivision.