80B. The Merit Economy

Possibly more important than the "conventional" economy, it is not taught in Economics schools. And for good reason. Understanding it is key to seeing what DEI and AI really are.

This paper is part 2 of a 3 part series explaining what DEI and AI are, and where this road is taking all of us. None of this is taught in schools to my knowledge, and I think you will have a pretty good idea why after reading this. The whole promise of “Anyone can make it in America if you try hard enough” is debunked here, with surgical precision, and without this ideology guiding our labor force, they would be a lot less cooperative. The third part of this series, 81C, is on Corporate Merit, which is very complicated and will be analysed mathematically/logically. I believe this 3 part series will allow you to understand DEI for what it is and without needing to take a “side” for or against it.

TRIGGER WARNING!: This paper details what non-consensual merit transfers are and why they are done. These sorts of “quiet crimes” are often seen as plot twists in movies, but in real space they are akin to rape or murder, and sometimes literally involve these also. This taboo subject is being discussed here because the process is not only becoming normalized, but even now is being automated. That means that everyone reading this will be subjected to this process if you have not already, assuming a normal lifespan. Prepare yourself in whatever way you need to before proceeding.

I’m going to start with some examples from Hollywood. Previously I’ve written a lot about what Moneyball got right and wrong, and how that ended up really messing up industry. I probably have mentioned Rainman in passing. I’m going to drill down deep on Rainman (1988) here, and also give some insights into what Tarantino was trying to teach us in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

Tarantino’s movie involves a fictional action star in the twilight of his career, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. As with any Hollywood action star, the studios have spent decades promoting him and building up his reputation as someone that just can’t lose, and certainly will never quit. But he’s getting old enough that the execs have decided to put him out to pasture. But all that merit he has accumulated is too valuable to retire. So he’s asked to play the bad guy in various movies with new young men who get to be the star by hunting him down. Thus the new guy becomes better than the old guy by beating him. This is what I call a merit transfer, and this concept is absolutely critical to understand where the world is heading.

In the old days (like 50 years ago) when kids were asked what they wanted to be when they grow up, they would say “Astronaut” or “Doctor” or “Policeman” or “President”. Today they will most likely tell you they want to be an “Influencer”. Hollywood and musical celebrities, and pro athletes used to be some of the most powerful influencers in the world. But that took a lot of work, luck, and powerful people backing you up. Now people can make videos about whatever they want, and if they don’t annoy the advertisers enough to get cancelled they can make a reputation for themselves. The followers they have are a metric measurement of their merit in the eyes of the public.

The endorsement of influencers or other stars is key to signalling to the public that they should buy your products. When they appear in your advertisements, or feature your product in their videos, they are transferring merit from themselves to whoever or whatever they are promoting. This can generate a lot of money, because in a world where merit seems to be on the decline merit is a very expensive commodity.

I would argue that merit is possibly even more important than money. This is why people will accept unpaid jobs in high profile companies as interns because they want to say they worked at some prestigious place doing some prestigious job. Even if they didn’t get paid. Because the perception of merit transferred from the employer to the employee is ultimately worth more money than a regular salary. This can set the trajectory of their career for their entire lifespan. This would be an example of a voluntary merit transfer. Unfortunately, and this is where the world gets dark, most merit transfers are not voluntary. Further, for the rest of the paper a merit transfer will be assumed to be hostile unless stated otherwise.

You can see this play out in Tarantino’s movie where DiCaprio doesn’t realize until too late that his merit has been transferred to someone else. A real life example of this would be Daniel Kaluuya who was the star in Get Out (2017). I thought the movie was brilliant and like Tarantino’s movie, it talked about subjects that you aren’t supposed to talk about. So I was expecting it to get cancelled in some way. He was nominated for Best Actor in Get Out and then the next year he ended up playing a villain in Black Panther (2018) and was used to transfer his merit to Chadwick Boseman who played the lead role in Black Panther and was a much less controversial person. Boseman died two years later, cleaning up that troublesome merit from Get Out.

When a non consensual merit transfer is initiated by an individual, the purpose is to transfer merit from the target to the perpetrator in order to make the perpetrator appear to be meritous. This can lead to promotions or job opportunities that they did not earn and are not qualified for. So if you wonder why someone you work with or require a service from (like a doctor) is spectacularly unqualified, chances are very high there is a merit transfer in their background. This also potentially makes them far more dangerous than you already think they are.

Time for some definitions:

[non consensual] Merit Transfer: An attempt to strip merit from someone and move it to another. This is a predatory act which can make the perpetrator dangerously unqualified and remove the (useful) target from the labor pool. The target has a moderate risk of suicide.

Merit Cancellation: This is when the perpetrator attempts to destroy the reputation/merit of the target without any possibility of transferring the merit. This can happen if a Merit Transfer fails and the perpetrator escalates the situation to dispose of the evidence. A typical example would be a false sexual harassment accusation. Lawyers will brag about how easy it is to win such cases if the target is male bodied. The Heard/Depp trial showed the world how easy it is to make such claims and just how hard it is to defend against them. Note that in the old days (50+ years ago) most of the perpetrators of Merit Cancellations were probably men (such as the Weinstein example below). But post “Me Too” male victims were excluded from protections so the balance of power has shifted. Merit cancellations can be initiated just out of pure spite also, especially in cases where someone is rejected by a romantic interest. In those cases I suspect an oxytocin backlash effect where aggression is being maximized, though research is still mixed on these. Such research might be quite hazardous so it may be a while before we truly understand those interactions. The target of the attack has a very high risk of suicide or going postal.

Group Merit Transfer: This is the sneakiest form of Merit Transfer, and its use in the game development industry is rampant. It involves deleting a key member (or THE key member) from the credits on a project in order to transfer the merit from that person to the rest of the team. You don’t see this as often in Hollywood because Hollywood has unions to protect the interests of workers. In that industry, workers know that getting proper merit from their work is absolutely essential. The same is just as true in the game dev industry, so when it happens it’s likely not accidental. Group Merit Transfers are performed to cancel the merit of a participant (but just on that project) and to boost the merit of others, some of which may have not done anything on a project. Being able to say you “shipped” X number of products is often a key requirement to being hired on another project. This is why many people are willing to work for free on some projects, like I did for the entire first 10 years of my gaming career (1997-2007).

Executive Merit Transfer: When a company (here I mean it’s leadership) initiates a non consensual merit transfer between two employees, the purpose is to transfer merit from a difficult/undesirable/older/etc employee to a new one that will do what you want without limitation. An example would be Employee 1 has the best skills but is hindered by a moral compass. You want her to do something illegal or unethical but you know they will not comply. So you have them train their replacement (a person groomed because they have the proper ideology or lack of morals), then fire the original person. If you can gaslight them on the way out, this can escalate the brutality factor. An Executive Merit Transfer has elements of all of the above types, so it is something of a hybrid action. These are not new, but are becoming more common and are now being automated by AI (example below). Risk of suicide is low to moderate depending on how brutal the action is, and how unexpected it is.

Executive AI Merit Transfers [Getting “Podded”]: In Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) [yes I know there are 3 versions] humans are duplicated by plants from space with such efficiency that the human species is replaced and eliminated. The plant doppelgangers are affectionately called “Pod People”. If an Executive Merit Transfer is initiated by AI, then you’ve been “Podded”. Like these two unfortunate voice actors. Millions of people have already been Podded. Some, like the employees that my partner managed for 5 years, were paid to be Podded. But in most cases people get copied without their knowledge. In the case of various creators, when their art/voice/stories are copied, this can be career ending. As in the foreboding movie, humans are being directed to feed energy to AI and AI is aggressively Podding the population at ever greater speeds and levels of efficiency.

Merit Transfers Against Non Neurotypicals

Now let’s talk about Rainman. The movie starred Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise and was the top grossing movie of 1988. It grossed $354M on a $25M budget, making it one of the most commercially successful movies in history. It also introduced the world to the concept of autism, and that there were autistic savants hidden among us that had special abilities that science could not yet explain. Hoffman played a very safe and inept savant that Cruise’s character quickly identified as a mark to be exploited. He was able to make a lot of money in one day doing a run at poker card counting in Las Vegas, a typical savant ability. Hoffman’s character was institutionalized as a child for being different, and at the end of the adventure described in the movie he is re-institutionalized. Without any rights, his entire life.

The ultimate mark is a savant. They have abilities that “break” certain conventions and can make a lot of money by gaming various systems. They are feared/shunned by society and thus not protected from merit transfers. If you can effectively merit transfer off of one, even briefly, you can be set for life.

Since savants don’t “play fair”, they are a “threat to society” and are normally isolated or deleted when they aren’t being actively exploited via a merit transfer. A good example of this is Dr. Alan Turing, often considered the Father of the Computer. After he saved the West from the Nazis by breaking their “unbreakable” Enigma Code, he was castrated and committed suicide (the #1 cause of death for high performing autistics). This would be an example of a Merit Cancellation.

Because “normals” prey on savants, savants go to a lot of work to hide if they manage to avoid institutionalization. Once they learn to “mirror/mask”, they are difficult to detect. I came out in 2016 at the urging of the autistic community to act as a voice for them. I don’t speak for all of them, but I do speak for them. Since then people have stopped trying to physically murder me (knock on wood), but the number of Merit Cancellations has increased dramatically in number and severity. I can’t talk about most of these as lawyers in the community rallied to save my life but now I can’t talk about it for legal reasons. But I really want to. I’m waiting for a proper subpoena.

Rainman is a stereotype, designed to be comedic. Dr. Asperger’s research was done on people with below average IQs. Science still does not understand us because they have not researched us, and even if we cooperated, there just are not enough data points to draw useful conclusions from.

Sex Based Merit Transfers

Let’s start with Harvey Weinstein as a more relatable example before I share my own experiences here. Weinstein would give attractive and ambitious (if they made it to Weinstein’s orbit, they automatically had these characteristics) actresses two options:

A. Play ball, and he would transfer Merit to you and make you powerful/famous.

B. If you didn’t play ball, he would tell everyone in Hollywood you were “difficult to work with” and end your career. This is a Merit Cancellation. The target’s merit is just destroyed, along with their career, without any direct benefit to the perpetrator. The indirect benefit to the perpetrator is that fear is generated in the community, making it more likely that others will play ball.

An example of someone that “Played ball” would be Leslye Headland, Weinstein’s personal assistant, who ended up in charge of the Star Wars IP. By being given merit she did not earn (please no jokes about how she “earned” it), she ended up in a position that she almost universally is recognized as unqualified for. I take this personally because I was one of the biggest Star Wars fans as a kid, on TV several times for sleeping overnight at the theater to be the first person in line when a new Star Wars movie came out. Sad to watch.

An example of someone that did NOT play ball would be Salma Hayek, who quickly found out that no one returned her calls or offered her work when she refused Weinstein’s overtures.

Sexual Merit Attacks perpetrated by men typically follow this pattern where the target (who could be a man or woman) must submit to sexual activity or face a Merit Cancellation.

Sexual Merit Attacks perpetrated by women typically come in two forms:

A. The woman may attempt to seduce a married or otherwise involved person (usually a man) and then extort the target for money or workplace favors under threat of disclosure to the target’s partner or employer. A “workplace favor” typically involves the target doing work for the perpetrator to make them look more qualified, a traditional merit transfer. If it’s an attempt to extort money, then it’s usually backed up by a Merit Cancellation threat (disclosure in this case).

B. An underperforming women may instead be attempting to target a non-partnered target with the intention of pressuring them to do a merit transfer to them in a school or workplace environment. If the target succumbs, then it proceeds. If the target rejects this puts the perpetrator in a vulnerable position so they typically follow up with a false allegation of some sort and a Merit Cancellation.

Sexual merit attacks from women tend to be more complex, under reported, and much more difficult to defend against due to an anti-male bias in our legal system and workplace culture. In the old days (again, like 50 years ago) they were likely also more rare. But now that women are teaching each other how to attack men in this fashion via social media they are likely more common than sexual merit attacks perpetrated by men. These videos tend to be removed if produced by men, and permitted if produced by women. This further promotes the activity and shift in cultural attitudes.

Sexual merit attacks are under reported because men are assumed to consent to any sexual activity, and male victims are almost universally shamed if they complain. In my case I am on the asexuality spectrum due to my history of being sexually abused as a child. This lack of sexual interest probably was part of why the UCLA and USA Olympic women’s track teams requested me to work with them, without me ever applying to them. So I routinely reject sexual overtures from women (and men). By rejecting in a dating environment, I might get yelled at but that’s it. If I reject someone in an academic or employment environment then this triggers some sort of retaliation (usually a false allegation) about 20% of the time. Because of this I document these sorts of encounters rigorously. This level of malice is likely invisible to men who just routinely say yes to every sexual opportunity and thus don’t face overt retaliation. If every woman said yes to Harvey Weinstein, he’d probably still be working in Hollywood. Thus a lot of malicious women go undetected.

While it did not involve a merit transfer, I think it timely to point out that I was the victim of a domestic violence situation where the perpetrator was a police officer. I went to the police twice for help and they just laughed and said there was nothing they could do until she actually killed me, then I could report it. I wasn’t amused. But they likely didn’t report those times I came in. I’ve seen some estimates that men are the victims of domestic violence at comparable or even higher rates than women, it just goes unreported so often.

Merit Attacks in the Gaming Industry

Almost every job I have ever had in the gaming industry has ended in someone attempting a hostile merit transfer against me. This is the “Doomsday Clock” I mention in my 2016 paper on Non Neurotypicals in the workplace. Once I’m identified, the hunt begins.

This in turn makes me an expert on hostile Merit Transfers. I will use personal examples to focus more on what Merit Transfers look like and how they work. Note that I began experiencing all of these from the age of 7 (including sex based merit transfers) once authorities identified me as “something very odd” with an unmeasurably high IQ and cognitive abilities higher than a normal adult college graduate. In the case of my math abilities, no one in my family or at school ever taught me any math, I just talked to numbers instead of people. I was placed in isolation at school from age 7 to 11, told to teach myself, and the rest of the students in my school were instructed not to talk to me. Teachers moved to the other side of the hallway when they saw me coming.

Okay let’s start down the LIST OF SHAME:

Dark Ages of Camelot (Mythic Entertainment, 2001): I started on this project at the “friends and family” stage. I did a lot of testing and helped especially with the crafting system. I observed that the two star testers, who always had the highest level characters after every wipe, were farming exploits that they were not reporting. They intended to keep these exploits to themselves so that they could benefit at launch, likely for the purpose of doing item sales. When I reported them, a Merit Cancellation was initiated against me, and despite my year plus work on the title, I am not in the credits. The 2 perpetrators, Jed Norton (Darkmoor) and his sidekick Jade (real name unknown) are in the credits. So in addition to the cancellation, this was also a Group Merit Transfer.

Shattered Galaxy (Nexon, 2001): I’m quite proud of the 18 months I spent on this fantastic title. To Nexon’s credit, I AM listed in the credits. It’s actually the only company that has properly listed me. But I found out after the game launched by a fellow American on the project that the person hired in California straight out of college to translate the work of the 4 American volunteer experts on the project just took credit for the work of those 4 Americans and submitted our work as his own. He ended up being promoted to a high level in the company. This is a classic Merit Transfer.

Horizons Empire of Istaria (Artifact Entertainment, 2003): While testing this title I noticed that at one point the dev team seemed stuck and could not finish the crafting system or economy. So I offered to complete the design for them and, to my surprise, they agreed. This allowed development to proceed. I found out later what was going on: The original designer, the brilliant David Allen, had been the target of a Merit Cancellation (I don’t know all the details) and kicked out of his own company. Of course I’m not properly credited but the real tragedy here was what happened to Allen.

It takes some balls to put the pre merit transfer author of a game under “special thanks” before replacing them with the perpetrator(s).

Army Rage (Yacuba Games, 2012): The first game I was paid to work on. But as soon as my monetisation model was confirmed good by the Beijing production studio I was dropped from the call and not paid. I ended up getting a partial payment by contacting the primary investor and alerting them to the misconduct. I’m not in the credits of course.

Civilization Online (2K Games, cancelled in 2013): I was personally thanked by Sid Meier for my work building the meta design for CO. This was one of the most complex economies I ever built, with 4 era economies stacked on top of each other. Each player would be on a nation team and would contribute to the progress of their nation in a 3D open world. Production was assigned to XLGames in South Korea. They flew out to meet with me and then told me they wanted to use all my technology but they didn’t want me (or any non-Korean) in their studio and they wanted to take full credit for my work. I responded by saying to 2K “sure, give me 3% of gross revenue first cut, and you can have my tech without mentioning me”. This was of course intended to kill the project, and as they knew they couldn’t build this without me, it did kill the project. I can’t stop praising Sid Meier, he is an inspiration to me, so this was a very difficult decision. Classic Merit Transfer attempt by XLGames. Note that some very suspicious content ended up in their ArchAge game, which launched after they collected hundreds of pages of economy design docs from me. The info I gave them intentionally omitted enough information for it to fail if it was stolen.

Project Spark (Microsoft, 2014): The Microsoft Long Range Research Team had been studying my published work for about 6 months and then summoned me to Redmond to see if I could solve a problem for them: They had a program created to tech children how to program. But they wanted to turn it into a game that kids would actually want to play. They didn’t know how to go about this. They flew me out for 2 days, I spent the first day just listening, and stayed up all night and produced a 2 hour solution presentation. There were 20 execs in the room. At the end their leaders said “we assumed you didn’t know anything because you didn’t talk that first day. But now we can see you understand our problem as well or better than we do and your solution is impressive.” They told me they would have to interview my competition first before proceeding. I told them I had no competition, and they ended up agreeing after the other interviews.

Project Spark was a technology that would have been retired if I hadn’t provided this path for it to be converted to a game, and it ended up being the first internally produced F2P game from Microsoft. I flew out to Redmond regularly for the year it took to finish. But then something strange happened. Everyone on the team was released from the NDA and was able to say they were on the team just prior to launch.

Except me. I was told to keep my involvement secret for another 3 years! They refused to tell me why. There are 611 people credited with this game. The mastermind on the project, me, isn’t listed there. They were really reaching to come up with 611 names. No one was credited with the monetisation work. It’s just omitted. I still have the shirt they gave me, all other evidence of my involvement has been scrubbed. Was this because of my ethnicity, or because I was autistic? I didn’t come out as autistic until 2016. So 611 people received my merit on that project.

World of Tanks Blitz (2014)World of Warships (2015) Wargaming: I was given full design authority on World of Tanks Blitz while I was at the Minsk studio in late 2013 and early 2014. Meaning, I called the shots and determined what the content would be and when it would launch, and of course produced all the meta design numbers/systems. I’m not in the credits.

On World of Warships, they wanted to just cookie cutter copy World of Tanks, with all four ship types (Destroyer, Cruiser, Battleship, and Aircraft Carrier) of equal power. I argued that this would not work, but my solution to make a game “fair” even with units of different power levels required an advanced monetisation model and meta design no one had ever seen before. It was high risk. It took me 3 months to convince them to go for it. I had dual authority over this project with Serb, the nuclear physicist founder who designed the original World of Tanks. He was the one that gave me authority over World of Tanks Blitz. So I got to work as his peer on this project, which was a huge honor for me.

Both games have earned over 1 Billion USD and are still going strong after 10 years using my long tail design technologies, with minimal changes other than adding new content. So what went wrong? Where was the merit transfer? I was treated very well in Belarus and Russia, and felt protected by Serb who would give me his house to stay in every time I deployed to the East. But to make all this happen I had to contradict a personal friend of Viktor, the CEO, his drinking buddy (who had no game dev experience). This guy was a Russian ultranationalist and Russia had invaded Crimea during this time, resulting in sanctions against Russia. This guy did not want any Americans in the company. In order to make these games work, I had to contradict him early on as he was proposing some stupid shit.

So he spent the next year plus gaslighting me in Russia until he had enough founders on his side to go around Serb. He locked my travel budget to trap me in the USA as I would have been protected in Russia. Then he showed up in the Austin studio and told me that I was going to write design papers from now on, only for him, and that he would submit them and take credit for them. If I didn’t play ball, he would have me fired. The classic Weinstein Merit Transfer scenario. I sent him the paper he asked for, but sent it to 2 other people. This was my way of telling him to go fuck himself. 2 weeks later I was fired.

But the disaster (for Wargaming) didn’t end there. This same person then placed himself in the Wargaming Seattle office (formerly Gas Powered Games) and repeated his formula there with Chris Taylor. I was one of 6 people in the room in Minsk Belarus when 2 founders (one of them was Serb) promised Chris they would fully fund his dream project (an MMORTS of unprecedented scale) if he was willing to transfer his GPG studio to Wargaming. My perpetrator managed to pull a Merit Transfer on Chris Taylor, resulting in Chris leaving game development and losing his studio. Chris Taylor is, in my opinion, the world’s greatest RTS designer. This was a loss for all gamers. The meta design I had put in his game, which was green lit before I left, was a very tricky economy engine inside of another economy engine. Both spun at different rates but fed back and forth to each other. It was sexy. Chris took up pottery and to my knowledge is still out of game dev.

SkySaga: Infinite Isles (Radiant Worlds, cancelled in 2017): I was living in the UK as the Engagement Director on this project. This was about the time I came out as Non Neurotypical so they hired me knowing this. I believe the main reason they brought me on was to convince Smilegate (from Korea) to fully fund the project, which they did after my assurances that I would make the game profitable. They had been reading my papers for 4 plus years and knew me well. But once Radiant got the funding they quietly fired me and kept it secret for months. They used my merit to trick Smilegate, and once Smilegate leadership found out they pulled the plug to limit their losses. 125 people in the UK lost their jobs as a result. Radiant was founded by the Oliver twins, who are famous in game dev circles in the UK.

[Not disclosing the studio]: I got a project fully funded by writing a grant proposal to a particular country. I was told I would in turn be relocated there as I didn’t feel safe in the USA anymore. I did in fact get attacked and hospitalized twice in Austin after this promise was not kept. I have permanent disability from these attacks. The police refused to do anything, even though they admitted they knew who one of the attackers was. This was a clear merit transfer used to get funding (similar to the Radiant Worlds scenario). But in addition I noticed that one of my female coworkers was autistic. Female autistics can be very difficult to detect. After she confirmed her status, I told the studio founder that the conferences he was having us work at (normally we worked remotely) were too loud for most autistic people and that he was putting her under a lot of stress. He would need to be careful with her for a few days. Instead, that very night he verbally attacked her and fired her because she watched a movie in her hotel room with a coworker. This really happened. I took this as a personal attack on myself since this person was under my protection. I left the studio and I assume the project is dead, despite quite favorable TV coverage. Unfortunately, these sorts of attacks are extremely common against autistic people, which is why they hide.

[And…] The worst merit attacks against me occurred after I documented what I believed to be evidence of not only pervasive harassment, but also possibly financial crimes. Because of … lawyers… I can’t talk about it. I await the inevitable subpoena. I had to seek emergency medical help due to chest pains (and I’m a life long runner), and was too weak to walk to the clinic without help from my partner. I almost didn’t survive that one.

Why Does This All Matter to You?

Merit transfers make the world go around. But the Merit Economy is a dirty secret no one talks about, and certainly not in economics schools. When I wrote Third Tier of Game Development in 2010 and predicted the future of the metaverse, I could clearly see that catfishing and what I would now describe as Merit Transfers were the greatest threat to labor world-wide in the coming decades. So I predicted that a Metaverse would be created to authenticate every worker’s merit to enable AI assisted systems to rapidly assign the best workers to any job world-wide, and that the future would be remote work.

The reason this will end up being my first (partially) failed prediction is that the people creating AI don’t see merit transfers as a problem, and they don’t see stealing merit from workers as a problem. This is the primary purpose of AI, at least it is as long as it is under human control.

This means that AI is going to be used to attack every worker on Earth, to give them a taste of what I described above in my life. I’m fairly resistant to these sorts of merit transfers because I don’t write down most of my tech. It’s safely in my head. Without me it could be weaponized and as a pacifist I can’t allow that. So if I’m killed my tech can’t fall into the wrong hands. I publish the bottom 25% of what I know, now stored here on Substack. The sorts of things I publish are at very low risk of weaponization, though my papers on dopamine driven design were unfortunately weaponized.

But the rest of you, and especially those of you complaining about DEI, are going to have your merit attacked. In metaphysical terms, this is sort of like having your soul stolen. If you are a Buddhist, merit is essential to your eternal existence. Transferring merit is a fundamental part of the religion so they understand this better than we do in the West.

So, why would companies use AI in this way against us? It’s cheaper to steal something than to create something. Regulations, lawyers, and public perception can make this harder, but in the absence of protections against merit theft it is very profitable to engage in it. Lawmakers, even if they weren’t bought by industry, are very slow to react to technology they do not understand. This will be all over before anyone can regulate it, at least in the West.

Since I observed the voluntary merit transfer applications running in the background in my house for some 3 years, I have a good idea of the rate at which data was transferred to the associated data centers to build Large Language Models (LLM). The current merit transfer interfaces like ChatGPT or Grammarly operate at 10 to 100 times the efficiency rate of those antiquated methods that were used just a few years ago. If the thoughts sold to AI back then were worth about $20 an hour, that means AI is getting between $200 and $2000 per hour of value from you every time you use these tools. I say “about” because human thoughts vary in value depending on which country they are from, which I find very interesting. This is why you often can use them “for free”.

And thus the reason that employees that don’t need AI are being replaced by employees with far inferior skills that are dependent on AI. The only “diversity” involved is that AI needs thoughts from everyone in order to “Pod” everyone.

[I feel it important to add that this mechanism of merit transfers has been the go-to method of eliminating undesirable racial minorities from industry for decades now. Industry will hire a token number of mixed race (white plus something else) employees to tout their attempts to integrate, and then merit transfer (or cancel) others. Overt racism is illegal in the USA and much of the rest of the world. But merit transfers are totally legal anywhere that there are not unions to protect workers. And USA corporations and the government have been fanatically anti union (and anti labor) for a very long time. The USA has had the most violent labor history of any industrialized country. Merit transfers are the legally safe way to suppress minorities. I don’t focus so much on racism in this paper, because even though AI is being trained to be racist (1, 2, 3, 4, etc), in the end all normal humans are going to end up in Human Zoo 0.1 and that’s ultimately more important than racism now.]

In the next paper, Corporate Merit (3rd in the series), I explain how merit has been perverted in the corporate environment, and how this taints everything (large) companies touch. I go into mathematical detail.