SF Now - The Doomsday Bureaucracy

There are rules and guidelines for everything these days, with new rules being generated all the time, the people who make them now have to go looking for problems that don't exist just so they can write more guidelines and keep their job. Or, if they are really lucky, they may just have some extra funding to spend on guidelines.

Often or not the guidelines aren't followed, but as long as they can prove they are by placing the right ticks in the right boxes and they have the paperwork to show they've followed the systems, that's fine. There are layers upon layers of regulations designed to make things fairer, simpler and more cost effective.

But instead they just restrict genuine freedom, fail to accommodate the people they are supposed to serve, stifle innovation and produce an expensive and dogmatic viewpoint. While at the same time allowing inefficiency, bias, laziness, and occasionally, sheer plain stupidity to thrive. Because there is always a way round rules for those who know the system.

A good example would be all the increased powers the police have had over the years, through additional laws and increased surveillance in our society, but they can't stop some rowdy kids making everyone's lives a misery. Or the inability to hold anyone to account when you have a problem with a company that holds your bank details.

If people knew what both public and private organisations did behind their backs, frankly, there would be a revolution. But again, there are levels of secrecy to which most of us aren't party to. You might complain about Problem A. and they will shake their heads and say that sadly there isn't an answer. All the time however, not only are they fully aware of Problem A. but it may actually be something they have deliberately created to offset Problem B. Problem B often being money.

Mankind shouldn't fear a possible SkyNet scenario with its nuclear warheads and attack robots, instead they should watch for the day when these organisations, weighed under with ever more fantastic and convoluted bureaucracy, finally become complex enough to become sentient beings in their own right. At that point, automated vehicles will come round every second Tuesday to collect us, strips us to our essential components, send them to the recycling plant where they are sorted, graded and then dumped in a landfill. And then, with all the people gone, at last, they can be truly efficient.