My Buddy Mike, Efficiency Gains From AI, and The World’s Most Boringly Benign Criminal Conspiracy

Note: details have been obfuscated and changed to protect – not the innocent, who are invariably vindicated by the end of act three – but the guilty, for whom the narrative provides no such guarantees. My buddy Mike is one of a very small number of people in my life I would unhesitatingly describe as having a real job [1] . He wakes up, takes the train into work, and directly helps specific people accomplish worthwhile things. Every shift, he leaves the world a little brighter than it was when he clocked in. And for this, the Economy awards him slightly less than double the local minimum wage. (Meanwhile, I spend about the same amount of time moving some numbers around, and am awarded approximately triple what he makes. They’re good numbers, and I move them with uncommon skill and deftness; still, it’s hard to look at the two of us and not feel like Graeber was onto something.) Among his many mundane duties is collecting, collating and reformatting The Information. The Information is freely available on The Website, but not in the format his bosses find most palatable. So every month, when The Information is updated, he spends a full day copying it line-by-line into The Spreadsheet