In the late 70’s I became a production manager for a small manufacturing company for the first time. Being new at that game and having many people depending on me to balance their wages properly, I wrote a program on a very small computer (before they were even called “PCs”, to sum up everything I knew of the people plus any more that might be relavent to how much the company could profitably pay them for their job. It including just about everything that you could associate with being an employee; attendance records, intelligence profile to suit the job, learning capacity to potentially suit other jobs within the company, average enthusiasm, attention to the task at hand, getting along with others, their own professed goals in life,… The program knew more about the personnel than their supervisors and the personnel department. And it also had a budget/profit algorithm with which to balance against wages.
I was surprised when I first ran the program that it yielded almost the exact same wages as they were already getting with few exceptions. This indicated that the program wasn’t strongly needed, but it was designed to be entirely altruistic, unbiased. That program was designed to use all the exact same information that “Human Resources” people gather on people today with the exception of prior whispered reputations. Today Human resource people do that same thing except that they usually don’t know that it is a program in a distant computer informing them, nor what biases are being used in order to engineer society in general.
That was back in the late 70’s. Computer derived advise gained through remote “statistics” (far less relevant to the company at hand) have exponentially increased in their influence and capacity to persuade managers, especially in large companies. A big part of managing a company is managing the managers; selecting them based on computer derivations and gauging them relative to computer derived budget/profit concerns. A big part of managing the managers is to ensure that they adhere to computer advise (whether they realize it or not) - “loyal to the machine”.
The intelligence of the people; the managers, engineers, and employees, is being replaced by remote machine intelligence. The people become merely humanoid drones. The people dare not think for themselves. Yet they are not aware that they are not thinking for themselves.
I saw it coming because I was a part of its original inspiration. It didn’t take a megatronic, super-duper, ultra-computer of any kind. Merely a clever intelligence designer/programmer with good intent.
And more recently, I built and programmed what I call “Jack”. Jack is a computer that emulates reality on the most fundamental level, below physics and automatically derives the “laws of physics”. Jack knows things that even I don’t know. Even I don’t argue with Jack. Yet Jack was not any grand super-computer, merely very smart.