Only in the Movies

I’m not going to be posting much over the month of August, since my cohort is in the middle of our run-up to Comprehensive Exams, and most of us are working fifteen to twenty hours a day reviewing the past two years of class assignments and readings. It’s one of those times when you really wish you had the “Time-Turner” gadget from the third Harry Potter story, so you could keep turning back time and pick up as many additional study hours as you wanted. The problem, of course, is that most of us will never have as much time as we want, even given an effectively infinite supply of it – and, so far as we know, mucking about in closed temporal loops is so impossible that it makes flying broomsticks, magical transfigurations and owls that are actually smarter than bread mold all look positively realistic. You can’t run your life – or your business – like something out of a Hollywood blockbuster…

Take, for example, the fictional “Omni Consumer Products” company from the “Robocop” movie franchise. In the films, it’s supposedly a giant mega-corporation that wants to buy up the near-future version of Detroit, level the place, and build a utopian hyper-city on the site. To do this, however, they have to eliminate the crime rate first, and in order to do so they decide to invest in cyborg technology when their huge, armed and armored robots (the infamous ED 209 “Enforcement Droid”) prove unworkable. As a recent article on the Cracked.com humor site points out, this is a terrible idea, not just because of the inevitable unethical human experimentation or because of the equally predictable collateral damage that results, but also because it’s a completely inefficient way to accomplish such a task…

Now, let’s be clear about this: experimenting on people is wrong, even if said people are too dim to realize that their employment contract gives the company the right to do just that; I would go so far as to call it blatantly evil, in fact. But even if we leave the movie’s eponymous hero out of it altogether, the company’s efforts to build giant robots brimming with military-grade weapons to enforce municipal laws would already be stupid from a business or economics standpoint long before we ever get to the ethics of the situation. For what a single billion-dollar robot that doesn’t work would cost you could field a police force of 20,000 uniformed officers for a year – or, if you prefer, roughly five (5) times the number of police officers currently employed by the Detroit Police Department in real life. For what even a small fleet of Enforcement Droids would cost you could flood the city with uniformed policemen, not only eradicating crime (without resorting to machines that occasionally spray their surroundings with bullets before falling down flights of stairs) but also providing a huge number of new jobs and giving a lot of deserving people a chance at a better life…

“Why does he tell us this?” I hear some of you asking. After all, it’s not like anyone reading this blog (assuming anyone reads this blog) is actually the head of an evil mega-corporation that is going to start building robotic enforcers, let alone stealing people’s brains for cyborg utilization. I bring this up partly because, as the folks who wrote the linked humor piece correctly note, this isn’t even the most egregious movie example of corporate stupidity in the last twenty years, let alone the most evil. In fact, if you watch enough movies you could get the idea that all senior managers are not merely evil and without a conscience, but credulous idiots as well. Which brings me to my main point: in a world where people were willing to risk a multi-trillion-dollar eco-disaster rather than spend $500,000 on safety equipment, it’s hard to say that impression is entirely wrong…

People don’t fight wars the way it happens in the movies; people don’t build buildings, heal the sick, care for their families, or teach their students the way you see it up on the silver screen. Maybe, in addition to the other standards we maintain for new businesses, we should be asking if anything the management team is doing is pure Hollywood movie logic – and, if it is, preventing them from ever starting operations…