Cyberpunk is about the dystopian future and dark places our technology can lead us. Cybernomics will look through cyberpunk through a lens of business, law, and economics. This piece is table-setting: offering a few big characters and an idea of a dystopia before diving into the meat.
Adrian and Jeremy Osborne live in the Danube Arcology. Both are current employees of the Danube Corporation. According to their employment contracts – 52 pages of legalese, printed, each, should people still print hard copies, which they do not – if both members of a married couple work for the Danube Corporation, they’re entitled to a Danube Smart Apartment. (“The Smartment™: a product of the Danube Corporate Family”)
A Smartment seems tiny at only 24 square meters (268 feet of space). However, a smart apartment comes equipped in the latest in Danube Corporation AI Smart Home Technology. The apartment reconfigures with human needs based on human activities, time of day, and required human necessities. The Smart Apartment learns from its human dwellers and optimizes the space usage using sliding smart walls, tables, cabinetry, and beds. Aided with an entire window wall and high ceilings, the space feels quite airy.
It is, according to Danube Corporation Arcology Building AI Research Team, the optimized comfortable apartment size for Adrian and Jeremy’s living needs. It encourages bonding while keeping the apartment functional and usable.
Starting at 6:30 am, the Smartment begins its change from nighttime and morning. Both Adrian and Jeremy have AI perfected morning routines for optimal health and happiness. The Smartment provides current health stats and trendlines as they rise from 8 hours of sleep.
Both start with a bathroom routine. No Smartment is complete without smart bathroom appliances that perform a full daily physical on Adrian and Jeremy. The Smartment sends the smart physical results to the Danube Corporation AI Medical and Wellness Research Group. Those AIs will compare Adrian and Jeremy’s stats to their trendlines and make proper adjustments in real-time.
There is no privacy in the Danube Arcology.
Afterward, Adrian and Jeremy both perform morning workouts tailored to their physical needs. The Smartment reconfigures itself workout needs. But, if Adrian and Jeremy wants a change of scenery, the Arcology has several parks and dedicated gyms on floors 47-55.
The Danube Corporation AI Medical and Wellness Research Group found that breakfast is essential for healthy and happy employees. The Smartment meters out the exact required calories for both Adrian and Jeremy’s morning meal. The mixture of fruits, grains, and pseudo-dairy is flavorful, and the Smartment has plenty of recipes to “mix things up.”
Breakfast is the only meal of the day they’re required to eat in their apartment. Afterward, they’re free to partake in any of the Arcology’s vast offerings of restaurants, cafes, and coffee shops.
Dressed in Danube-flared clothing, marking both Adrian and Jeremy as “proud Danubians,” they head off to jobs. Adrian and Jeremy join rivers of other flared people in lines for the Arcology’s tubes of travel-pods to whip them off to their offices.
During the day, Adrian and Jeremy eat lunch at Arcology restaurants and cafeterias (where the Arcology AI measures their caloric intake and balances it against their activity metrics). At night, Adrian and Jeremy have a dazzling array of entertainment options for themselves and their friends. They can configure their Smartment as a private theater and host movie night. They can play interactive games in Danube Entertainment Centers with other Danube employees. Some of the best chefs in the world work in Danube Arcology restaurants. Bars are on almost every public level (also metered to ensure moderate intakes of alcohol). Adrian and Jeremy can have anything they want – within reason, safety, AI-controlled public acceptance policies, and the constraints of their employment contracts – in the Arcology.
At night, the Smart Apartment reconfigures itself for sleep. In the morning, it all begins again. The existence is, all and all, as advertised: idyllic and utopian.
Best of all, Adrian and Jeremy never need to flash a credit card or cash. In the Arcology, the Danube Corporation provides everything. The Danube Corporation draws the cost of lodging and food from the same checking accounts – provided by the Danube Banking Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Danube Corporation – where it deposits paychecks. Food, entertainment, lodging, purchases, medical, transportation, all acquired with a wiggle of a nose, as it’s all powered with AI facial recognition. Should Adrian and Jeremy overdraw, the Danube Banking Corporation will issue them instant credit and add their spending habits to their monitoring health dashboard, which the Arcology AI will then optimize.
Adrian’s day job is a data scientist and researcher in the Arcology’s Human Optimization department. The Danube Corporation has long parted with the concept of “human resources.” They see humans as a problem solved with finding solutions in the data and nudging humans to perform within AI-generated plans. The Danube Corporation has AIs pulling data points from all its employees, all day, and filtering them into an enormous data warehouse where Adrian and those in Adrian’s department work to build new models.
Adrian has advanced degrees in both psychology and mathematics from a top-shelf university. She spends all day finding a signal in Danube’s vast stores of human performance data. Adrian is excited to come to work – not because she has found something new, but because she has an idea for a whole new product. She’s been studying the last few non-automated workers in the Arcology’s fast food court. She’s figured out ways with psychological signaling and proper work placement to make them more useful.
Buried in Adrian’s employment contract is a promise the Danube Corporation dangles to all its employees. If the employee figures out a way to replace themselves, permanently, with a discovery, technology, or a product, Danube will buy that product in exchange for a retirement package with a house in a Danube Corporation managed development and money to live, job-free, for the rest of their lives.
The Danube Corporation does own all unique creations created by their employees during employment, including all patents and trademarks. They could take the new product. However, this policy discourages employees from leaving the Danube Corporation, starting their own companies, and competing in the market. The Danube Corporation wants no potential competitors, certainly not born from within. The few million paid to the creator is nothing. Found money. Should this product be worth something, the Danube Corporation may make billions.
And, according to the AIs, the policy is good for morale and incentivizes the employees to create themselves out of a job.
Adrian wants that house. She picked one out from the Danube Corporation Internet. It’s in a part of Florida not currently underwater from the effects of climate change.
Jeremy works in the Danube Arcology’s AI Security Services, producing online weapons against the continuous onslaught of attacks over the Internet from the outside. Security is the one place the Danube Corporation cannot replace humans with AIs. The attacks from the outside are relentless. Jeremy is an expert in training generative adversarial networks that learn and morph and change as the attacks change.
Jeremy also has advanced degrees, but his degrees are in computer science and mathematics. He has no dreams of creating new products for the Danube Corporation. Jeremy doesn’t care about living in planned Danube communities. He is too busy fighting the constant onslaught of state- and non-state actors.
Jeremy’s job allows him privileged access outside the Arcology’s Corporate Internet for research purposes. An AI from the Human Optimization Department watches and checks everything Jeremy does during the day to ensure nothing goes awry. As Jeremy reaches across the boundaries from the safe Arcology interior to the fetid outside, the AI ensures his mental and physical state is reading green.
Jeremy has insight into how to construct AIs that check human behavior. He’s also a security researcher, and by inclination, he knows how to manipulate computers to do things they do not want to do. He figures out how to fool the monitoring AI. It was simple. While Jeremy ventures into the greater, wilder, dirty Internet, the AI happily reports back that Jeremy is a model employee.
Jeremy became cynical about this whole Arcology existence thing. And then he got cynical about the Danube Corporation.
The Danube Corporation does not know when Jeremy Osborne contacted Anonymous of AntiCorp, a shadowy distributed anti-corporate organization, because Jeremy removed all his tracks from the edge firewalls. Jeremy avoided the monitoring AI for years. They do know he laced the AIs he built with backdoors to allow narrow access into the Danube Corporation Internet’s secure areas.
Not because the Danube Corporation ever found the backdoors or figured out what AntiCorp stole, but because Danube Corporation’s extensive spy network tracked down a single, solitary hacker down in the slums. This hacker gave Jeremy up in exchange for avoiding torture and keeping his life.
Of course, the hacker died anyway.
The Danube Corporation has certain provisions in the employment contract. It’s recommended everyone who can afford a lawyer get one before signing – although the Danube Corporation makes it clear it will accept no changes and no modifications to that contract under any circumstances. It is what it is to accept a position, live in luxury, make a huge pile of money, and take a run at a lottery of being paid for life. Deep down inside, the language is murky with what the Corporation can do should it “at will” terminate an employee for breach of contract. A very good lawyer indeed will inform their client that the language means “anything.” And by anything, it means anything.
In this case, the Danube Legal AIs made their decisions at the speed of electrons processing through data.
The Danube Corporation offered Adrian Osborne her dream. They would buy her ideas to optimize and automate the work for more menial positions which were still un-automated. She would get her house in a dry, gated, high-security Danube Corporation-owned and controlled community in Florida. They would pay her millions to retire and leave the Arcology.
In return, she needed to divorce Jeremy. Once she said yes – they always say yes, once they understand the spouse is a traitor to the utopian mission – the Danube Legal AIs took care of the details. Since Danube knew everything about Adrian and Jeremy’s finances and possessions, Danube made the split fair. They coordinated with the external nation-state’s electronic legal system.
For Adrian, it was painless. Her friends from her department threw her a goodbye party. The Danube Corporation hooked Adrian up with their matchmaking service. An AI paired her with the perfect partner already living in the new community.
Jeremy, however, was terminated. The Danube Corporation did not offer Jeremy to the host nation-state where people still believed in some outmoded and un-automated notion of “justice.” That was for the poor and the weak. He was, instead, gifted to the Danube Entertainment Research Division, who hungers for test subjects. A healthy specimen with a fully functional brain is a precious commodity.
The Entertainment Research Division sliced off the top of Jeremy’s skull, riddled his brain with electrodes, and performed their entertainment experiments. They gave his meat to a well-regarded NGO elsewhere on the planet as useful calories.
Regardless, the Danube Corporation gave the next couple on the waitlist Adrian and Jeremy’s Smartment, which configured itself for their unique needs and gave them the optimal living experience learned from their habits within the Danube Arcology.
Image Credit: Art by Jaydot Sloane of Vanity Games – http://www.patreon.com/VanityGames
“Would you like to know more?”
Clicks “yes.” Loved your D&D series!
Thank you! I liked the D&D series, too!
I will spend more time with the Danube Arcology — how it got built, what’s in it, what Danube does with the data it collects. And alot of other topics!
I want more of the D&D series. You should clean it up and publish it in a book.
I enjoyed your earlier series on Dungeonomics a great deal, and it has inspired parts of my current campaign. I’m hoping to run a CP2020 campaign or shortshot later this year, and I’m sure I’ll find these posts equally inspirational.
I actually missed that these were fictional pieces when I started reading 🙂
Eagerly awaiting more in this series!
Thank the maker! You’re back! Content! Glorious content!