Comment by Balgair
3 hours ago
> We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking.
Somehow this reminds me of the old adage in finance :"The optimal amount of fraud is not 0"
Meaning that you could of course come up with a system in your accounting or banking or stocks or whatever that is totally 100% fraud proof.
But that system would be so onerous that none would use it. They'd go back to a more fraudulent system that is easier. Like, 15 retinal scans, a blood draw, and a bank approved minder just to buy a taco isn't workable, duh.
I'd say the same here too. You can of course use AIs and LLMs to figure out exactly how much work a person is doing and try to optimize them down to the second. Amazon is currently doing this in their warehouses. Any given month comes up with yet another instance of a worker dying on the floor and people having to continue working around the literal corpse.
And Amazon then has to run through communities, one after another, trying to hire people to work in that system. Their SEC filings note, incredibly, that population exhaustion is a real threat to the workforce.
Thus, the optimal amount of surveillance for an evil megacorp is not 100%.
Draconian, sure. But Amazon is already over the balance point and is trying to squeegee back towards the optimum. So far, it seems to be a lot further back than we thought.
Same principle as too much security. One of the things that contributes to this is that the safety side usually doesn't have any incentive to reign itself in.
There is an old adage for that general idea.
"The treatment should not be worse than the disease"
What a relief, it won't be 100% but just to the extent that Amazon does it in their warehouses.
>Thus, the optimal amount of surveillance for an evil megacorp is not 100%.
Yes, and they will do it anyway, as long as they can afford it, and even if they can't.
Business decisions aren't always optimal.