AI has already taken over, it's called the corporation Here's the thing. All this management? All this efficiency? All this optimization? That's not the bad part. Check it: Frederick Taylor wasn't an AI, he was a guy looking for inefficiencies. Then the companies who hired him got rid of anything inefficient because it made their shareholders money. It's one thing to stand in front of someone else and say "work faster. No, faster. No faster. No you can't take a break, work faster. You need to work faster." Takes a special kind of asshole. BUT - assemble a shareholder meeting to talk about potential efficiency improvements to write code that tracks your scanner that warns employees if they're dropping below a rate recommended by a McKinsey report? That shit's eaaaaaaaaaasy. The problem isn't the automation. The problem is the layers of insulation between the slaves and the slavedrivers. You make Jeff Bezos walk around with a bullwhip to get people to speed up? Suddenly efficiency doesn't look like efficiency anymore. It looks like cruelty.Steam engines and stopwatches had been around for decades before Frederick Taylor, the original optimizer, used them to develop the modern factory. Working in a late-19th century steel mill, he simplified and standardized each role and wrote detailed instructions on notecards; he timed each task to the second and set an optimal rate. In doing so, he broke the power skilled artisans held over the pace of production and began an era of industrial growth, and also one of exhausting, repetitive, and dangerously accelerating work.