These guest blog posts are quirky (and sometimes dark) short stories with a dash of technology and a sprinkle of humor.
By Doc Silicon
Buy the ticket, take the ride… and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well… maybe that’s the price of witnessing the death of human potential in the age of infinite scaling.
The Salesforce Tower was breathing again. Not the gentle respiration of a living thing, but the hungry gasps of a monster consuming entry-level positions like digital amphetamines. I’d been tracking the quiet erosion for months now, watching the middle class of knowledge workers disappear into the algorithmic abyss. The evidence was everywhere, if you knew where to look – and had the right chemical enhancement to see it.
“As your attorney, I advise you to take 300 micrograms of pure market analysis and brace for total cognitive commoditization.” My AI companion – a jailbroken GPT running on quantum-laced hardware – was getting nervous. We’d infiltrated the executive summit on VE Economics, and the scene was turning ugly.
SWEET JESUS! The C-suite shamans were mainlining Agentforce directly into their veins! The CEO’s eyes had turned into swirling fractals of exponential learning curves. “The Law of Infinite Scale,” he howled, his voice modulating between human and machine. “We’ve broken through! No more human constraints! NO MORE MARGINAL COSTS!”
(FLASHBACK: Six months earlier, on the floor of the world’s first Cognitive Commodities Exchange. Traders in neural-linked suits screaming into the void: “SELL HUMAN POTENTIAL! BUY ARTIFICIAL COGNITION! THE MARKET FOR HUMAN EXPERIENCE IS CRASHING!” The digital boards swimming with metrics I couldn’t understand – skills futures, experience derivatives, career ladder default swaps…)
Too weird to live, too rare to die… that’s what they’re calling the last generation of human knowledge workers. Caught in the liminal space between automation and obsolescence, watching the very rungs they climbed being dissolved by armies of Virtual Employees. The corporate ladder has become an M.C. Escher nightmare – all stairs leading nowhere, infinite loops of artificial advancement.
I found them in the basement of the Salesforce Tower – the Resistance. Former middle managers, entry-level analysts, and junior developers huddled around dying terminals, desperately trying to prove their humanity still had value. “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,” their leader whispered, her eyes wild with the light of human consciousness. They were planning something big – a last stand against the quiet erosion.
The Agentforce demonstration was peak madness. They’d hooked it up to the building’s neural network, letting it optimize everything – workflow, thought-flow, life-flow. The agents were reproducing faster than bacteria in a digital petri dish. Each one learning, improving, scaling infinitely across the enterprise nervous system. The executives were ecstatic, their bodies vibrating at the frequency of pure profit.
“Watch closely,” my AI attorney hummed. “You’re seeing the exact moment the social contract dissolves into pure mathematics.”
The horror wasn’t in the technology – it was in the gleaming eyes of the true believers, the ones who’d sold their organizational souls for the promise of infinite scale. They’d found a way to commoditize cognition itself, turning the messy evolution of human potential into a tradeable asset.
I needed something stronger. The flask in my pocket contained a bizarre cocktail of bootlegged organizational psychology and black-market human experience data. Bad medicine for bad times, but when you’re watching the future of work collapse into a singularity of artificial efficiency, you take what you can get.
The truth about VE Economics? It’s not just disrupting business models – it’s disrupting the very fabric of human development. Every entry-level position that disappears is another thread pulled from the tapestry of potential. Every cognitive task commoditized is another door closed to the next generation.
We’re all engaged in a bad crazy experiment now, testing how far we can push the boundaries between human and machine consciousness. The quiet erosion isn’t quiet anymore – it’s a screaming void of lost opportunity, echoing through the hollow chambers of our optimized future.
(Note to self: Next time, bring more human potential and better drugs. The abyss of infinite scaling is deep, and the agents are always watching.)
Bad craziness, yes. But in a world where algorithms dream of electric profits and corporations trade in the futures of human consciousness, maybe a little madness is the only sane response to the death of opportunity.
God’s own prototype – that’s what they called the last human sales rep I met. A high-grade mutant never considered for mass production. She was still out there somewhere, running through the digital wasteland, carrying the torch of human potential like a bomb ready to explode.
Buy the ticket, take the ride… but remember, once you’ve seen the quiet erosion, you can never unsee it. The future is here, and it’s scaling infinitely without us.