I Am A Specific Individual (and so are you)

Most people look at the Egyptian pyramids and see massive stone monuments, ancient wonders of the world.

I see an algorithm. An algorithm run on the platform of a human machine. A human machine composed of people, each completing subroutines as tasks broken down into logical components. Some of the components involve teams, others specific individuals. 

The pyramid constuction itself is not the objective function, or not the primary one. The objective function is the creation and maintenance of the human machine itself, that can make pyramids or whatever else you want. How the pyramid is built within this larger system can range from a lean mean harsh system of slavery to an almost playful state of volunteerism.

Is this going to be about AI? Thankfully, no.

When I was 12, I read a book called The World of Star Trek, by David Gerrold, who wrote the "Trouble with Tribbles" episode. One of the chapters involved story telling and world building, and Gerrold used the example of what world could create the starship Enterprise, by substitutiing what the modern world needs to do to make a 747? 

There are the materials and skills required to build the plane, but also the expanding network that supplied those materials and skills, until before you know it, everybody and everything in the world is involved. How do you cost that out? (The answer is when the signal of cost is swamped by all the other costs, which is typcially about 18 months).

This opened my pre-pubescent mind to the world of supply chains 50 years before I heard the phrase.

Supply chains? Supply webs! Once you start sourcing out what it takes to build, not just the airplane, but everything you need to build the airplane, all the way down to feeding little bitty babies, you realize its a gestalt. A whole greater than the sum of its parts.

It blew my tiny little mind. Material conduits of algrorithms involved in a big bang of creation called the 20th century, and I should have stuck with pursuing logistics, but I didn't, and here I am now, in a shitbox apartment typing on a 30-year-old computer piggybacked onto my smart phone hot spot.

What was the point? Is that how CEOs see people? As componetns within a machine, a super organism? I think the psychopaths do, and as I can turn off most of my humanity when I need to, I get where they're coming from. But we do recognize collective good and collective effort and helping all as vastly superior fro the individual as oppsoed to a war of all against all, a Hobbsian beast, a parasitoidal feast.