CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Neural Net God
Jenner’s new task was technically more challenging than Project Dagger had been. Monocle consumed her and her dedicated staff, but she still continued extracurricular hacking. The system manager had terminated her access at the system manager level at the end of Dagger. She then complained to the Asp that this might slow down her progress on the new project, which was more complex and just as critical as Dagger. He granted her the desired access once more.
She kept her notes all on paper now instead of in an electronic notebook, cross-referencing decisions and actions taken by the system manager. Certain decisions began to attract her attention, like those that appeared illogical or to override certain operating principles. Most decisions she analyzed resulted from such a complex or obscure data set that she was unable to judge the merit. Some notable exceptions, however, puzzled her because she couldn’t trace the erroneous data back to a specific person.
COPE’s style of management put the computer at the core of every operations decision. Conclusions depended on an elaborate system of decision criteria driven by policies that had been translated into a nightmare of mathematical algorithms.
This set of policies not only drove the decisions, but also automatically generated new decision criteria or revised old ones as the environment required. This was the innovative, and many said high-risk, part of COPE’s automated management system. Many managers at COPE called this a foolish dependence on an uncontrollable machine. Having a machine interpret and apply existing policies, they said, was risky enough. But empowering a machine to modify the policies themselves, or even to institute new ones, was the ultimate foolishness. The young PhDs, however, all educated in new-wave management science at the country’s leading universities, carried the day. This was COPE’s “window on the future.”