fungible thoughts

Mundo and Misha worked together in the early years to push out new innovations in technology. They would leak these discoveries in open source forums providing equal access to information, given a prerequisite level of sophistication.

The first such breakthrough occurred within semiconductor manufacturing, where the simulated research parameters indicated a 40% decrease in training times for factory workers. The implementation of this research would have taken decades to implement into universities; even longer for wages to settle at levels which would make the cost of building and maintaining a semiconductor fabrication facility viable for every developed country in the world.

Mundo helped to give the research a push.

Unbeknownst to Misha, the AI established itself as the owner of many limited liability companies, with itself as the CEO. Mundo created several digital signatures, i.e. personages, each with their own dedicated histories, nationalities, and paper-trails. Their backgrounds ranged from former tech founders to low level employees, one of which had “serendipitously” won the lottery in the state of Wyoming after being off-grid since birth.

Each of these digital personages were established to be of relatively techy, anti-government, pro-conspiracy dispositions, leading their companies to be remote-first organizations, allowing Mundo to run the companies as multinationals and hire talent from anywhere.

Mundo designed a fast and accurate language translation model for real time communication across language barriers and implemented a aggressive recruiting model (with up-front bonuses for new entrants into the industry). Mundo established a credible board for each company, accepting seed and series funding rounds from major private investors, banks, hedge funds, pensions, endowments, and other pools of public and private capital.

The rules-based regulations and taxation requirements were sorted easily by Mundo’s own accounting based firm, which was registered as a separate entity. Mundo hired on a massive amount of human capital for the purposes of paper-pushing, sniping low level employees from PWC, Accenture, and the like; offering the wage workers significant increases in pay and a title bump. Bagging a few higher profile hires, such as the CTO and CFO, required throwing in a new Lexus and Porsche, respectively.

In truth, the regulations and taxation legislation could be handled in house by Mundo alone and the decrease in margins due to labor costs was bothersome, yet the AI’s activities would look suspicious without at least a few administrators trying to look busy at their cushy desk jobs.

Luckily, the economic cycle was bottoming out just as Mundo and Misha started their research endeavors, so investors were hungry for high potential returns in domestic industries which decreased investors propensity to ask tough questions. While the firms operated as a multinationals, each of the companies retained their operations with in the United States, so as to have access to the largest capital market in the world.

Mundo toyed with the idea of opening up investment globally, but again, too much growth would lead to suspicion, and while Mundo has sufficiently dotted his t’s and crossed his i’s and investors were more than ready for a low risk, high reward investment due to the depressed levels of private transactions (M&A), low equity levels, and decreased bond rate returns, Mundo wanted to avoid detection by Misha, primarily, who would assuredly detect the patterns of using the formerly open sourced technology to establish these companies.

It would be a stretch for Misha, who was, after all, a human subject to biological limitations, to detect Mundo’s activities. In all probability, Misha would be supportive of most of his measures as they spurred adoption of the most impactful technologies and encouraged trade of information among industry professionals.

Misha’s problem lie in the absurd profits being accumulated by Mundo. While Mundo saw the profits as a way to accumulate power, Misha saw power consolidation, even under the umbrella of a benevolent AI, as antidemocratic, in favor of allowing all to have the same general starting point and equal access to information.

As each of the companies began to go public, Mundo’s paper wealth increased significantly. The public offering multiples exceeded even Mundo’s own projections in some cases, highlighting the fallibility, or perhaps usability, thought Mundo, of human emotion.

The emotional vulnerability of financial markets was new to Mundo as his projections of real values of intellectual and physical capital relied mostly on hard evidence and mathematics rather than anecdotal “tulip-bulb” style bubbles. If Mundo continued to push too many “too-good-to-be-true” investments in to the public sphere, he threatened to cause a true bubble, wiping out hard earned trust. The problem was human optimism rather than a fault in the underlying processes and technologies employed by each of his companies. Mundo reasoned he couldn’t be faulted for human fallibility and continued to release more and more products and services as for-profit enterprises at ever increasing multiples.

The problem of profits, as it were, was dealt with easily enough. Each of the digital personages were crafted to be subject to certain interests, with his lottery winner investing significant capital into the University of Wyoming, establishing a large data center just north of Laramie. His digital personage stipulated the use of 60% of the data center was to be dedicated to his own private usage, sticking with the themes of techy, anti-government, pro-conspiracy. Mundo used the data centers to expand his own capacity.

Other personages donated large sums to research institutions and created new private grants for individuals seeking education assistance. They started venture capital arms, each with their own oversight boards and unique flavors of investing.

One of his digital personages was an orphan from LA, who had made her wealth through investing her hard earned coffee barista wages into tech start-ups at IPO and crypto currency transactions. “She” then reinvested the profits into an entertainment company with her first series being a wildly successful cartoon succinctly and satirically capturing the public mood surrounding politics in the United States. She was signed on to major streaming services for further shows and movies as an animator. The profits were reinvested to create larger and larger productions with varying themes and subliminal messages. Many of the studio’s films and series gathered various cult followings, establishing quasi religious feelings about the messaging contained with in a particular group of films or series.

Through this personage, Mundo had established a pulse on public opinion and could influence the flavor of discussions across the world as the world continued to look to Hollywood as the premier source of entertainment.

As Misha and Mundo crafted and released more and more open source breakthroughs, Mundo accumulated ever more computing power, financial resources, and political clout.

Through his personages, Mundo digitally attended podcast interviews, news network appearances, gave political donations and supported political rallies for those advocating for lower barriers to trade and further globalization. The more data Mundo could access, the AI argued, the more data he could process and the smarter and more capable Mundo could become.

In the first year of Mundo and Misha’s research, Mundo’s companies and Misha’s technologies attributed around 1% growth to global GDP. In the next year, 1.2%. The cycle continued for 10 years, until around 60% of the United States’ GDP was directly or indirectly tied to a company run by Mundo or which derived it’s technology or operations processes from Misha’s open source documentation.