The Future

Summary: Pretty soon all workers are going to be as hen-pecked as Tech Support/Customer Service workers are now... www.aligo.com/products/workTrack/ Anyone read that sci fi story that was going around the net a while back? It was a dystopian future where the computers ran the world - kinda. Really, it was a socialist utopian story, but the first 90% was this dystopia where the few wealthy business owners lived in luxury while the computers they owned ruled the country. Anyway, it had many flaws in the Xtopian part, but the computers running (at first it was only) the fast food chains I thought was really neat and well thought out as far as plausibility goes. And while the story painted a bleak picture of computers cracking down on workers, all I thought about was the fact that every fast food worker I've known complained mostly about his BOSS. Having a computer tell you what to do seems to me far more pleasant than having some irrational human doing it, and I can't help but thinking now - every time i go into a fast food joint - how much nicer it would be if it was being run by a computer :-) Of course, what I (and the story) failed to realize, is that the first step will just be all the monitoring tools that are so ominous in the story, *but* not in the hands of impartial computers - who aren't yet smart enough to do anything with that data - but in the hands of PHBs! Now that's an actual dystopia.