It’s a big conference room deep in the Muska-Dome, headquarters of Elron Muskatel’s vast business empire. About twelve figures are seated at a svelte conference table, including the Big Man himself. It’s Wednesday, not too long ago.
Elron Muskatel’s eyebrows do a brief dance.
A woman in a light beige jacket, touches her fingertips and begins. “Hello everyone. This is a status meeting for the on-going projects you are heading here at ySpace.”
“ySpace? Why not?” everyone chants.
The blue light in front of a slight, bearded man dressed in a black t-shirt seated at the auster conference table lights with a light “bing!”
“Ah, my turn. If we haven’t met, I’m Nigel Smith, Product Vision Engineer. Taskmaster, actually.” Light laughter around the room. “Good news! Overall efficiency boosts often up to 100%”. The Muskatel eyebrows raise and then lower.
Nigel continues. “Now with the mergers of the Y companies complete we are rolling out the core yGrok AI features throughout our all our product lines. Initial results.” He flicks a finger and a video of some kind of humanoid robot appears on the wall. “This is The Optimizer. As you can see he’s good at kicking.” Nigel’s fingers dance briefly on his tablet keyboard. The video changes, showing a typical office scene.
“In brief, here’s what happens. Customers route their email system through yGrok. As we know, many email systems are now utilizing inferior AI services.” An example email flips onto the screen. “Here we see a common failure – an AI summary of an email that’s longer than the original email itself.” Groans throughout the room.
“Our approach is unorthadox, but effective. yGrok provides a more thorough analysis and when the AI detects failures such as repeated emails from a sender, emails not worthy of the effort to delete…” the video switches back to the humanoid robot kicking. “The Optimizer makes a visit to the offender’s cubicle and kicks him or her in the nards.” On the screen we see the robot foot laying a man right out onto the floor. Light giggling in the room. “You may laugh but pointless and ineffective email use is down 80% across the organization.” A chart of numbers appears on the screen. “In fact, we find that a single enforcement action by The Optimizer focuses staff productivity by staff in the entire department.”
A light smile appears on Elron’s face and his eyebrows twitch again. The blue light blips off in front of Nigel and pings before an overweight Indian-appearing gent in a dark blue blazer. “I am Raj Swalli, my pronouns are ‘fuck’ and ‘you’.” Giggling in the room and Elron nods in approval. “With our yGrok AI engine being the core uniting our product lines we are poised to exploit one of the biggest and most sustainable marketing opportunity in human-kind history.” He pauses. “Porn.”
Elron’s eyebrows dance and he blinks several times. Everyone in the room seems to understand what Elron is indicating. “Yes, as adoption of our humanoid ro-bots like Optimizer advances, there will be more and more leisure time for meat-bots, I mean people.” He pounds on the conference table. “We are liberating humankind from drugery, but what are they going to do with all their free time?”
“Ah yes, I think we see the answer to that. But wait, there’s more! Let’s hear from the transportation team.”
A woman in a cream blazer stands and starts sweeping her arms. “As we know, initial sales of our groundbreaking MegaTruk have been… disappointing. Instead, we are executing a pivot, that I’m sure will excite you.” A graphic is displayed showing a timeline of corporate investments and partnerships. “Our earlier investments into the research arms of Pizza Bell and Taco Hut are bearing fruit.” She’s waving to a sequence of images showing what appears to be a sequence of average Americans who appear to be at home eating.
“Thanks again to our core product, yGrok, we can pinpoint the exact moments when individual potential customers, sometimes known as ‘stoners…’” light giggling in the room “…are ready to buy. Our predictive AI technology based on deep knowledge of customer behaviors allows us to put pizza and taco products, hot-and-ready, in customer hands just as they think to order.”
The screen changes to show a man in a Laz-E-Boy in front of a TV pausing and reaching for his phone, only to be interrupted by a car horn beeping outside. It’s the PizzaBot, and parked at the curb a blocky Pizza Bell-branded MegaTruk.
“We slide a Pizza or Taco mobile factory unit into the cargo section of the MegaTruk and now we’ve solved our unsold MegaTruk inventory problem.” Applause all around. Someone in the back erupts with “Much better than giving them away free with Happy Meals!”
The Elron eyebrows appear pleased, even to those unused to his unorthodox communication style. Then they dance some more and include a squint.
“And now we pass the meeting over to learn about the progress being made on our Mars transport ships…”
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