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Yup, this is it, this is the real life version of the beginning of the Manna story.

He didn't anticipate that AI would require a huge amount of processing power and that AI safety would be such a huge problem.

Amazing this book is from 2003 - very prescient.

> Version 4.0 of Manna was also the first version to enforce average task times, and that was even worse. Manna would ask you to clean the restrooms. But now Manna had industry-average times for restroom cleaning stored in the software, as well as “target times”. If it took you too long to mop the floor or clean the sinks, Manna would say to you, “lagging”. When you said, “OK” to mark task completion for Manna, Manna would say, “Your time was 4 minutes 10 seconds. Industry average time is 3 minutes 30 seconds. Please focus on each task.” Anyone who lagged consistently was fired.

Feels like Amazon took some inspiration from that.

ai and neural networks aren't needed for this sort of work metric monitoring. You'd have found this in factories decades ago.

The situation that is described in Manna is merely something that would occur under complete free market capitalism, and assumes that people would not change or adapt to meet the challenges of automation.

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