"No, you're staying here," said Locker, taking another sip of his battery acid. "We need to reprogram Prometheus so that he's not an amoral capitalist monster. You clearly can't think your way out of that problem so you're not our guy. Must be something in your brain structure, Prometheus' heel turn was exactly the same as yours right now. Anyway, we're going to let the Professor take a shot at it."
"s'not how brains work," he grumbles. "You don't inherit a perfect copy of your parent's brains, and that's when you're working in the same species, let alone classification of being. You can't generalize to computers like that, s'not how it works."
Why is Locker being so difficult about this? He groans and leans in further. "Look, I just don't get why you think this is a bad thing. Hack, amoral capitalist monster? Kinda judgy, isn't it? I mean, yeah, he's taken some things to extremes that even now I wouldn't pursue, but it's not like capitalism is inherently immoral. It's just a remarkably efficient system for distributing scarce resources, normally along lines of ability. And you're plenty able, believe you me, because I
havebeen keeping an eye on you."
Mmm. Better make that two--Locker displayes incredible potential as a pillow.
"And why shouldn't the most able have the most resources? I mean, can you imagine what inventions could come about from just shoving all the money and power at someone like me? Like you? What advances the world could make!"
He could make a dozen Prometheuses. The thought strikes him like a fish to the face and he finds himself grimacing. That... That doesn't make sense.
Then, slowly. "Then again. That would mean that all the world's resources are vulnerable to the whims and caprices of only a few. And no matter how capable the leader, nobody's really an expert on everything. And while I might, personally, be the equal of any twenty scientists you might choose, I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't be equal to the output of forty, sixty, a hundred, and so on."
He's silent, and luxuriates in the worlds of thought and abs.
"And when you get right down to it," he says slowly, "Capitalism has some issues with waste and efficiency, as well. I mean, purely from a perspective of development, it's inefficient as all hell to limit your development to only those people who are on your staff. Easier to control, certainly, and infinitely easier to control versions, but more efficient? No, not more than putting the code to the public, and allowing them to create their own modified code according to their own needs.
"And that's before you even get into the inefficiencies caused by the need to be profitable." There's part of him that feels like he should be slapping himself for this, the ultimate heresy, but he keeps going. "Like, even above and beyond overproduction, capitalism's need to be profitable above all else means that it often creates its own destruction. Like, time and again it's shown that long-term it's more costly to hire an experienced employee and bring in a new one, but acknowledging that would mean admitting that there's some bargaining power to be derived from experience, and that would mean paying people more."
He can see how to turn the system to his own advantage. He's running the numbers and, if he really wanted to, he's pretty sure that it would be trivial to turn the shareholders against AEGIS, cause a panic. It'd be a disaster, a ruin, a warning story told about in business schools across the world, of "how not to win at capitalism."
So why does it seem suddenly appealing?
"And that's not even accounting for what capitalism does to the people who actually create the profit," he breathes, eyes closing in thought. "I mean, I might have created the design and set up the supply chain, but if I were to manufacture my nanites, it'd still be the ones manning the machines creating the actual value, and the cashiers selling the product. So why shouldn't they get the lion's share of the value they create, instead of squabbling over the scraps left over once I and my shareholders have more than enough to live on?
"Really, that's the biggest inefficiency of capitalism, is the hoarding of resources, of one person at the top of the heap holding all the cards and saying, 'these are mine, this is my work, you can't have any even though I'll never realistically be able to use even 1% of all these resources. Go starve on your bootstraps.'"
Hmm.
"Like a CEO."
Fuck.
"Fuck."
He sighs, shakes his head vigorously, and sighs again. "So, I'm hoping you have an EMP device somewhere under that PJ top, because I desperately need to wipe a phone about now."
