Outsourcing? Offshoring? A.I.? These are all smokescreens to distract you from the REAL threat to your job—the Madagascar Giant Millipede!!

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Background:

Certain types of office jobs, such as data entry, are limited by the typing speed of the operator. This is generally acceptable for humans, because human hands are adequate for keyboard typing.

The smallest common keyboard has 61 keys (a so-called “60%” keyboard: https://www.google.com/search?q=60%25+keyboard). So the maximum possible human key coverage (Figure 1) is (9 fingers ÷ 61 keys) = 9/61 = ~15%.

Fig. 1: Nine human fingers—not ten!—are shown operating a keyboard. The space bar occupies both thumbs, which may be a major design misstep that prevents all 10 fingers from doing useful work. The keyboard shown here is a full-sized one, not a “60%” keyboard.

Proposal:

The important thing here is to watch out for other “apex predator” species that may displace humans in the office. Although Homo sapiens has successfully dominated the “typing” niche for over 150 years, it’s important to not become complacent.

Let’s look at the “endpoints” of the spectrum of possible threads to the office worker: specifically, the land animals with the likely lowest and highest typing proficiency.

Lowest proficiency (Figure 2): Likely to be the snake:

Fig. 2: With no limbs at all, this snake is only able to type in the amateurish “hunt and peck” style.

This provides a useful baseline for evaluating the threats to typists: if we look at human typing proficiency (“H”) divided by snake typing proficiency (“S”), we get the fraction (H / S), which tells us the relative gain in typing ability gained by adding ~10 typing-capable fingers to an animal.

Highest proficiency (Figure 3): Likely to be the giant millipede:

On the other end of the typing spectrum, the giant millipede (Figure 3), with over 400 legs, is certainly the grand champion of typing! This animal is the top threat to human domination of the Earth.

Fig. 3: Apparently the giant millipede is somewhat smaller than this picture implies, BUT on the other hand, maybe this isn’t a full size keyboard! It could be a tiny keyboard.

If we assume that 15% coverage of a keyboard is adequate (which is what the human had above), then a giant millipede with 400 legs should be able to operate a proportionally larger number of keyboards. Specifically, (400 (legs) ÷ 9 (human fingers)) keyboards = 44 keyboards at once!

Conclusion:

Now that we’ve learned that a single giant millipede is able to replace as many as 44 office workers, we see the severe employment threat! (However, please also consider the cost and efficiency savings of switching to millipedes: for example, imagine if the line at the D.M.V. went 44 times faster.)

PROS: Makes office workers aware of the future threat to their employment, which may allow them to proactively obtain millipede-proof skills.

CONS: Once the millipedes have taken our jobs, it’s unclear where—or if!— they will stop!!!

Originally published 2024-08-12.