Brainoid

Now the senior executives of Brainoid Company and officials from relevant government departments are sitting in the conference room, and outside are the administrators on strike. Outside the glass window of the conference room, in the four cubic kilometers of space in the virtual world, there are people suspended every ten meters up, down, left, front and back. Looking from near to far, it looks like a huge lattice of people.

Both sides are calm at the moment, but everyone at Brainoid Company knows that the authority management in Brainoid is actually very lax. It is exactly the same as in the real world. Whether they are senior executives, ordinary researchers or outside administrators, their permissions in the virtual world are the same - the so-called "authority" refers to the degree of integration of consciousness and brain-like bodies, which is determined by the interface type. decision, regardless of position status.

This means that if the administrators really want to take any drastic action, it will be easy. The laws of physics in the brain are themselves artificial, and the facade of the brain's corporate headquarters is nothing more than a pile of data to the administrators who are above the "rules."

In this case, if the executives of the brain body company want to suppress the administrator strike, the only feasible way is to temporarily shut down the brain body. And suddenly shutting down the brain-like body, even for a few minutes, will cause them hundreds of millions of economic losses, and have a very serious impact on the free market in China and Russia. Therefore, not only the executives of Brainoid Company did not dare to be tough with the administrators, but the government officials present also responded with a soft attitude towards this illegal strike.

At this time, Qi Min realized with some surprise that in the real world, the resistance of grassroots workers no longer posed a threat to the state machinery, but the strike of the administrators in the brain made both capital and the government powerless.

"Teacher Zhou, what are their demands?" Qi Min asked Ms. Zhou Xiaoshan.

"The people in the management department are currently negotiating with them," Ms. Zhou Xiaoshan said, "but generally they just ask the brainoid company to stop using the monitoring assistant application, and there are also common demands such as reduced working hours and salary increases."

Reducing working hours and increasing salary are actually easy to negotiate, but deactivating the monitoring assistant would be too broad: "The monitoring assistant is mainly designed to ensure the safety of the researcher's consciousness, and it has little to do with the administrator."

"But I have to say that it is a bit unkind to force administrators to turn on the monitoring assistant when working." Ms. Zhou Xiaoshan said this to the administrator.

The monitoring assistant has not been online for long. For researchers in the R\u0026D department, the monitoring assistant is like a vital sign detection system for consciousness, which is conducive to ensuring the safety of consciousness. However, the administrator's work intensity is not that high and no special security protection is required, so the monitoring role of the monitoring assistant is very obvious. In addition, the senior management of the brain-like company's management department forced the implementation of monitoring assistants, which brought natural resentment to the administrators. It is not surprising that they are now resisting monitoring assistants.

At this time, an official from the Labor Bureau interjected: "Mr. Qi, this monitoring assistant that the administrator resists was developed by your R\u0026D department, right?"

Qi Min is a little confused. In principle, all projects of the Brainoid Company are developed by the R\u0026D department, including the monitoring assistant. It is not unreasonable for the administrator to call "the R\u0026D department a dog", but the scope of this impact is too great. Moreover, the R\u0026D department did not develop the monitoring assistant to monitor employees. It is not up to the researchers to decide what the senior management will do with it.

"The monitoring assistant was developed by the R\u0026D department to monitor the status of researchers, while the monitoring administrator is the responsibility of the management department." Qi Min just stated this fact.

"We also know that this has nothing to do with the R\u0026D Department, but now the strike managers are demanding an explanation from the R\u0026D Department." An official from the Labor Bureau said, "The monitoring assistant is deactivated, and the R\u0026D Department promises not to develop any tools to monitor employees' brain activity. , this problem is solved.”

Qi Min feels that not having a monitoring assistant is not a big problem. Researchers in the R\u0026D department can voluntarily use intelligent monitoring tools, but that is to ensure their own safety, and if the administrator refuses similar monitoring, it will have no impact on her. However, Qi Min is not that naive. She still understands that the reason why senior colleagues in the management department use monitoring assistants to monitor administrators has its own logic. What is good for capital managers may not be good for ordinary workers, but in fact it may not be bad for ordinary workers. The relationship between managers and workers is not a simple binary opposition.

But now that the head of the management department has gone to negotiate with outside administrator representatives, Qi Min has to put in a good word for her colleagues: "The monitoring assistant is not just for monitoring administrators. You know the Taylor System in the early 20th century, right?" Although scientific management is a more serious alienation for grassroots workers, it is also the basis for the department to maintain stable and effective operation. The management department of the Brain Company is responsible for the stability of the entire Brain World, and quantitative labor is probably also to respond to market demand. .”

What she said offended both parties. But no one can say there is anything wrong with this. The use of intelligent monitoring tools to monitor administrators is an extension of the Taylor system to non-productive industries, and this alienation is also a necessary process for the development of the management department.

It has only been three years since the commercialization of brain-like bodies. The number of new users every year is growing exponentially, and will soon cover one-tenth of the country's population - don't think this proportion is small. Even the Internet eight years ago was still small in China. Only about 300 million people have access to the Internet every day. As a self-contained virtual world, brain-like bodies have already invested a very high cost in managing such a large user base. This quarter, the number of employees in the brain-like company's management department has exceeded that of the research and development department, which is the production department. However, even so, the "power" of the management department is still slightly insufficient. On the one hand, the management department needs more administrators. On the other hand, the application threshold is lowered in order to expand recruitment, which also makes the work of administrators need to be unified and standardized. Quantity and quality are obviously issues that need to be considered.

This may be the dilemma that capital encounters after it reaches a certain level, but the fundamental reason is still the contradiction between capital’s profit-seeking expansion and socialization. It is obvious that the management of the brainoid world has been far behind by the speed of expansion, and the contradictions caused by unbalanced development have turned into pressure on the administrators, which broke out at this time.

“What do you mean, you can’t make concessions to administrators in terms of monitoring?” an official from the National Development and Reform Commission asked.

Qi Min looked at Ms. Zhou Xiaoshan, who coughed lightly and said calmly: "The key to the problem is not necessarily the monitoring assistant. You know that technological progress cannot be stopped. Our management department did handle the situation improperly. There is a lot of room for discussion about salary increases and reductions in working hours, as well as compensation for the families of administrators who die suddenly.”

This is a euphemistic way of saying that the monitoring assistant cannot be deactivated. As CTO, Qi Min actually doesn't know much about the management department, but since Ms. Zhou Xiaoshan said this, it shows that quantitative management work based on monitoring assistants is actually part of the brain-like company's development strategy.

It is possible that conflicts between labor and management will become more and more serious in the future. After the technological dividends brought by the initial creation of the virtual world subside, what has happened in countless capitalist economies will also happen to brain-like companies.