Page 16 - Like No Business I Know

Boilerplate and the Second Law

human language will be unquestioned; witness the recent history of
art, architecture, and music. Less knowledge of the structure of
language on the part of institutional authors dovetails nicely with
more user-friendliness from the word processors they employ on the
job.”
The applicant paused, for dramatic effect or a lungful of air.
“Now, here is where men of vision can anticipate developments
and get in first with a new product. The final stage in this progression
will be the first step in the expulsion of human beings altogether
from the field of official communication: computers will write to and
for each other. As I said before, this is not pie in the sky; artificial
intelligence is not a prerequisite for a purely formal translation of
shared protocols. What a piece of writing means will be output to
interested persons as a series of synthetic-speech stripped-down
statements, a reversal of the menu selection originally producing it.
Internally, computers will abstract and codify documentary content in
a minimal format for statistical analysis. Ultimately these codes, a
kind of electronic boilerplate, will be the only data transmitted
between machines; the standardized human language they represent
would only be reconstituted on request. At that point, writing will
exist only as a leisure activity, not as a vital part of the workaday
world.”
“And this will be driven into reality, simply because business will
seek the lowest transmission and storage costs of all this boilerplate.
Therefore, it will buy the software converting standard text into and
out of the most compact or compressed format. So, here is my
proposal: I have the technical know-how. All I need is some start-up
capital to get this going. Some fixed asset expenses, plus contracting
out the individual types of communication format to people in the
various fields—they won’t know what we’re doing with the
information. And then—”
Lazaretto held up his hand. “Wait. Stop. Hold it right there. How
much? How long?”
Attorcoppe gulped. This was it: time’s up.
“I’ve costed it out pretty closely. For the first eighteen months I’ll
need a million five plus another half million line of credit for
contingencies. That’s the development phase. Then, for marketing, I
estimate another two-year period of—”

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