Page 7 - Unlikely Stories 3

Omega

CEO: But why hasn’t Tingley been visible? Did his algorithms fail,
suddenly spinning out of control after all those triumphs?

CCLO: Ever since Omega started making headlines with its
acquisitions and stock buyback program, a lot of people have been
trying to find him. He didn’t want to be found. And then he couldn’t
be found: an unidentifiable body was fished out of Lake Tartarus two
years ago which is probably his. It doesn’t matter now.

EDO: So he did have other partners, and they continued his policies?

CCLO: Not exactly. Now, in my investigations, I had a head start on
the other companies owned by Omega: none of you were part of
Amalgamatrix four years ago when we were among the first to be
outmaneuvered by Tingley’s algorithms. He had not completely
covered his tracks at that point. I found people who knew him at
Berkeley. They told me Tingley had been politically radicalized in his
last year of school. So there he was, a leftist running this very
successful capitalist enterprise through his surrogate, a huge
computer program driven by heuristics to be the smartest company
in existence. It would have made sense for him to pull the plug on it.
Instead, upon graduation, he moved it to a private server outside the
university and kept it running. And it kept learning. Thanks to our
own greed it has triumphed.

CEO: That’s rather a harsh judgement.

CCLO: But justified. We preach trickle-down economic theory, the
invisible hand of the market, and pure meritocracy within
organizations; but we have warped and corrupted that lip-service
ideology at every turn. I’m as guilty as the rest of you: I’m only
human, without a strong loyalty to any cause but my own security
and prosperity. We have destroyed representative government before
it could mature, pushing the majority of humanity into permanent
poverty while we mercilessly plunder nature. In order to eliminate
any public control of our operations we bought both American
political parties, promoted obfuscating narratives in the media,
denigrated science and the humanities, and finally overreached.

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