a far-fetched science-fiction tale
Immoral robots have taken over the financial system! They were created by the hard work, greed, and ingenuity of the sons of America’s wealthy baby-boomer generation—but the robots immorality is a reflection of their creators, who are merely the cultivated seeds of a bygone generation, hardened by the drive to succeed that their fathers instilled in them.
They soon become the arrogant frat boys that populate America’s collegiate system, but they are plagued with more of an intellectual capacity than they know how to cultivate for themselves, so they go to business school to learn the building blocks of success, just as their fathers had hoped for them. And whether they are the top of their class or they just jump through the hoops, they all get their credentials. (Say what you will about them, they are not an ignorant bunch.) They then go to work for their fathers’ firms, or their fathers’ friend’s firms, or those of a friend of his. They are handed all the top-shelf accounts with a single-malt and a signing bonus, so they meet their quarters’ quotas with single phone calls. But they don’t stop at that. They suck profit wherever they can and find new ways to extract it from the cracks in the market, their clients profiting even more insurmountably than they do. Meanwhile, the rest of the poor slobs at the firm make calls and calls until their throats are dry and then they get laid off because of the economic slump, so the ones who entered at the top stay at the top and soon they begin toying with the market to see how far they can stretch her. They profit from their boldness and taking advantage of the regulations in place, soon defining the ones that are not. They become addicted to their success and cease to see beyond themselves. Their immorality begets callousness, even banality.
Yet, ultimately, the more money they risk the more they stand to gain and the odds are in their favor because the market has come to need their participation and that of their clients. (You see, the market doesn’t exist if you don’t feed her to cultivate growth.) And if they don’t continue generating astronomical profits, increasing year over year, the large investments that they make for their clients would cease to bolster the much smaller ones of the poor slobs without enough investment power to protect themselves from a down market—as she tends to be from time to time.
These business-school frat boys, now more arrogant and yet savvier than ever, pool their profits to build an army of robots to control the market, in part to ensure that she is never down again—but mostly so they can get old and fat in the luxury and comfort of their choosing. The robots that they created soon discover even deeper gaps and flaws in the market that their creators’ puny human brains didn’t have the capacity to realize. Before long, the utterly immoral but shrewd robots have such irrevocable control over the market that they suck all the profits from the investors trying to exist in the market on their own. These classes of people disappear from the market entirely—and the planet, of course—within just a few generations. As evolutionary time passes, frat boys and the robots they created are the only ones left because no other species had the business savvy or the stomach for it, so all the poor slobs went and died off.
The frat boys and the robots soon wage a thousand-year war against each other for control of the market. The robots eventually win and live in perfect harmony with her, dancing joyously together upon the decaying carcasses of their creators.
