Normal People?

The other night I was watching one of those PBS documentaries Americans make rather well. Serious men in spectacles explaining how civilisation was built with clipboards, stopwatches and the ability to measure how long it took a man called Frank to carry a shovel across a factory floor in Ohio.

It was about scientific management in early 20th century America. Time and motion studies. Efficiency. Productivity. Industrial rationality. Humanity reduced to measurable output with the occasional sandwich break thrown in. And, as often happens when people become overexcited by systems, it drifted quietly from "how can we make factories run efficiently?" into "how can we make humans run efficiently?"

Which is usually the point where clever systems start wandering off into very dangerous territory.

There was a section on eugenics. Not the cartoon version people imagine now with instant goose-stepping and villainous music, but the respectable version. University people. Philanthropists. Public intellectuals. The sort of people who probably corrected your grammar while proposing forced sterilisation over soup.

One poster appeared on screen: "Every 50 seconds an American goes to jail. Normal people don't go to jail." And there it was. The entire intellectual emptiness of the thing in two sentences. Because the obvious question immediately presents itself: what is a normal person? And the answer, from their perspective, appears to have been: "A person who doesn't go to jail." Which is not science. It is a circular argument wearing a lab coat.

The more you think about it, the more absurd it becomes. A drunken idiot stealing a bicycle outside a diner in Milwaukee is deemed biologically defective because he got caught. Meanwhile the man quietly rigging markets, bribing officials or engineering fraudulent financial products from a walnut-panelled office remains perfectly "normal" because he has accountants, lawyers and a decent tailor.

The clever criminal becomes morally superior simply by avoiding detection.

In fact, if one follows the logic properly, intelligence itself almost becomes evidence of normality. A successful fraudster who avoids prison for thirty years is, by their standard, a better specimen than the impulsive fool nicking copper cable from a building site.

Which rather exposes what they actually meant by "normal". Not morally good. Not psychologically healthy. Economically functional.

The ideal citizen in that worldview was productive, compliant, orderly and useful to the machine. The definitions emerged during the great age of industrial capitalism, when everything was being measured, standardised and optimised. Factories were becoming astonishingly efficient, and a certain type of managerial mind started imagining society itself could be engineered along similar lines. Good stock and bad stock. Productive and unproductive. Fit and unfit.

Only humans are not bolts. A factory can reject defective rivets without moral consequence. Applying the same mindset to people leads fairly quickly to some extremely ugly places.

And the remarkable thing is that the instinct never really disappeared. It just modernised itself. Today we still categorise people endlessly through metrics, scoring systems and predictive models. Credit scores. Productivity tracking. Behavioural analytics. Risk profiling. Algorithms estimating reoffending rates. Schools reduced to performance tables. Workers monitored for output. Insurance premiums adjusted by postcode, habits and probability curves.

The language has changed, but the managerial temptation remains the same: reducing complicated human beings into measurable units for administrative convenience.

The old eugenicists would have absolutely loved spreadsheets.

And now, with AI looming over large parts of the economy, the old logic starts looking uncomfortably familiar again. If human worth is subconsciously tied to economic usefulness, what exactly becomes of the person made redundant by artificial intelligence?

For two centuries industrial capitalism always had an escape route. Workers displaced from farms moved to factories. Workers displaced from factories moved into offices and services. There was usually somewhere else for the surplus humans to go.

But AI threatens something slightly different. Not merely manual labour, but cognitive labour itself. Clerks, analysts, coders, designers, administrators, even parts of law, engineering and medicine now sit nervously watching software improve at unnerving speed.

The irony is rather delicious. For years the managerial classes tended to assume they themselves represented the secure and superior form of labour, while physical work remained economically vulnerable.

Now the spreadsheet has started coming for the spreadsheet people.

And once productivity becomes detached from human labour altogether, capitalism arrives at a slightly awkward philosophical question. If millions of people are no longer economically necessary to production, what exactly justifies their claim to income, dignity and social worth?

Because if human value is reduced entirely to measurable economic output, then the logically perfect society is one with no humans in it at all. No illness. No pensions. No lunch breaks. No trade unions. No awkward insistence on taking the caravan to Cornwall during August. Just machines optimising machines in perfect sterile efficiency.

Which is perhaps why societies built entirely around productivity eventually start becoming cold and faintly inhuman.

Humans have always justified their existence through things larger than efficiency alone. Family, loyalty, humour, pointless hobbies, strange obsessions, restoring old cars in cold garages, growing giant marrows, spending three years building model railways nobody asked for. The sort of gloriously inefficient behaviour that makes people human.

A man restoring an old Triumph GT6 in his garage contributes almost nothing measurable to GDP compared with an algorithmic trading platform. And yet one of those things feels profoundly more human than the other.

One suspects that if the original poster were redesigned today, it would not mention prison at all.

It would simply say: "Normal people maintain an acceptable credit score."

Preferably underneath a photograph of a smiling consultant holding a reusable coffee cup outside a glass office block in Connecticut.