The Mech Touch

Once Ves and Gloriana made up their minds, they announced the institution of weekly quotas to the Design Department.

"The SF-02 is incredibly powerful." Ves spoke in front of the gathered mech designers. "Each of you has experienced its capabilities. It is making life incredibly convenient for you all, but that is not necessarily a good development. Our civilization has always grappled with the problem of relying too much on automation. The more we off-load work to AIs, the more control we cede over our lives. Lack of practice is detrimental to your development as mech designers. If you keep delegating work to our smart AIs, you will deprive yourself of essential practice and experimentation. The lack of effort will slow down your progress and cause your careers to stall. Are you truly willing to remain stuck as Apprentices or Journeymen?"

Many mech designers shook their heads. The vast majority of them were new and optimistic about their future.

They derived a lot of pride in their ability to work in the legendary Design Department of the Living Mech Corporation!

Even if their design capabilities were nowhere close to that of Ves or Gloriana, many of them still fantasized that they would be able to transform themselves and one day catch up to the founders of the Larkinson Clan!

After a bit more lecturing, Gloriana took over in her capacity as the director of the Design Department and announced the weekly quota rules.

"In order to limit your dependence on the SF-02's powerful capabilities and encourage you to exercise your design skills, we will limit the amount of hours you can make extensive use of its processing power. Once you have used up all of your quota, the smart AIs will become inaccessible to you. The SF-02 will only grant you access to as much processor power as before, which is not much. This should be enough for you to complete your work assignments by relying on a classical design approach."

It was not a good idea to deny access to the SF-02 entirely once a mech designer had used up his quota. He could only rely on consumer electronics or their own cranial implants to perform their calculations. This was far too inefficient and also highly insecure.

"The weekly quotas are based on your mech designer ranks." Gloriana continued. "The higher your rank, the more agency we are willing to bestow you. We believe that as long as you have managed to climb your way up through hard work and ingenuity, you should already have enough awareness and self-control to seek the best development trajectory for yourself. If you still fail to withstand temptation and use the smart AI as a crutch to save yourself from doing hard work, then you will ultimately bear the consequences of your own decisions."

Everyone looked as if they took her words seriously, but Ves and Gloriana knew that they were only humans. There should definitely be a lot of mech designers who wouldn't be able to resist temptation and use their access to the SF-02 as a way to shirk hard work instead of using it for its intended purpose.

Ves could have added an instruction that caused Momo and Polly to intelligently track how the mech designers made use of their capabilities.

They possessed enough understanding and familiarity by now to judge whether a mech designer was trying to be more efficient or whether he was attempting to slack off during his work shifts.

If the two smart AIs detected any instances of the latter, they could deny any requests to leverage their processing power and tell the mech designers to do the hard work themselves.

However, Ves ultimately rejected this measure. It was way too intrusive and risked going too far. No good would come out of micromanaging his subordinates.

Mech designers were not children and should not be treated as such. They were already adults when they started their careers, and they had to grow up even further in order to earn the qualifications to undertake greater responsibilities.

Ves ultimately agreed with the Rubarthan philosophy of treating this as a test. Those that were able to resist the easy way out and proactively sought to challenge their design skills held greater promise. These mech designers all possessed the potential to rise above their peers and become the next pillar of the Larkinson Clan such as Ketis.

As for those that did not push themselves too much and stagnated as a result, they had their own place in the Design Department. There was always a need for assistant mech designers that took care of a lot of low-level grunt work such as performing tests, recording data and designing variants that catered to different demands.

Ves and Gloriana had given their subordinate mech designers enough hints about their thoughts and intentions.

It was up to the mech designers themselves to act upon that information.

After Gloriana briefly explained the intentions behind the quotas, she announced the specific numbers.

"Novice Mech Designers are granted a quota of 4 hours per standard week. Apprentice Mech Designers are granted a quota of 10 hours per standard week. Journeyman Mech Designers are granted a quota of 16 hours per standard week. As for Senior Mech Designers, they are no longer bound by any quotas. Do note that these quotas are based on the time that the processor cluster is actively following your math-intensive requests. It is not based on power consumption, calculations per seconds or other units of measurement. This means that the actual amount of processing power at your disposal may change on a daily or hourly basis depending on load and allocations."

Ves and Gloriana wanted to keep the quota system simple and straightforward. The SF-02 may undergo drastic changes in the future that would cause its efficiency to undergo a lot of upheaval. It was better to use a unit of measurement that would remain constant regardless of how the processor cluster changed in the next few years.

Predictably, a lot of mech designers groaned and expressed dismay at the figures.

This was an understandable reaction.
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The low-ranking mech designers previously went from being able to make use of the SF-02 on an unlimited basis to being restricted to using it for 4 or 10 hours at most!

Even the Journeymen became disappointed at the harsh limitation on their own usage. A quota of just 16 hours was not that much considering that their work often involved design applications of considerably greater scope and complexity.

This limitation massively cut down their productivity!

The consequences were quite severe. Many mech design projects would take weeks or even months longer to complete due to lacking the ability to conduct a lot of simulations.

"I can see that you have objections." Ves spoke up as he crossed his arms. "Your feelings on the matter are irrelevant to us. We have put much thought behind the weekly quotas. We cannot afford to ignore it. Having it speeds up our work by a huge extent. The more work we get done per day, the faster we are able to pump out mech designs, many of which are essential and directly impact the survival of our clansmen. That said, I will not allow the SF-02 to turn you into spoiled children. The processing power it offers is abundant but precious. It cost us a lot to acquire it from the fleeters, and it takes a huge amount of energy just to feed its hunger. The cost of spare parts and materials needed to maintain the SF-02 over its lifespan are also high."

He wanted to remind everyone that the SF-02 was a luxury they could never have access to under normal circumstances. It should never turn into a freely available public resource that clansmen could borrow at will.

"To the Novices and Apprentices among you, the quotas are particularly low for you because you are in your formative periods. These are the stages of your career where you need to accrue experience and master your fundamental knowledge through practice. The quotas you have received are enough to complete a large amount of high-volume calculations of low complexity."

It took skill and thinking to gain the most results out of the least amount of resources. Ves wanted to encourage the mech designers to be frugal and efficient in their usage of the SF-02.

"As long as you construct your requests in a clever and efficient manner, you will waste less processing power, which leaves more room for other mech designers. So long as you intelligently master the data-driven design approach, you will find yourself with a large amount of time that you can use to manually solve more complex design problems. If you have any free time left after that, you are free to study more knowledge or work on your own personal design projects. However, if you do not adequately master the skills to make efficient use of our smart AIs, then you will end up spending more time on monotonous design tasks."

Gloriana gave the mech designers a warning. "In light of the latest changes, I have rescheduled your work assignments to allow for more time. That said, I have carefully calculated and modeled how much time a typical Novice, Apprentice and Journeyman needs to spend in order to complete the new assignments. I expect that each of you should not have any problems with completing your work within the fairly tight deadlines that I have set. The key to completing your work in time lies in the usage of your weekly quota. You can solve many low-level problems within an hour's time of using Momo or Polly's services. That same hour can also be spent to obtain margin progress in solving a complex, open-ended problem."

"Even if you feel the need to make use of the SF-02 to solve a complex problem, then at least put in the effort to complete as much preparation as you can by yourself." Ves added his own thoughts. "It is much more sensible for you to understand the underlying rules and principles of the problem at hand first. This will allow you to narrow down the range of solutions. The better you grasp the theories and how to apply them, the more effective you can execute this approach. If you only use the smart AIs to solve the last steps that you cannot effectively complete by yourself, then the SF-02 will not be as heavily burdened and should not take too long to spit out the answers you sought."

Both Ves and Gloriana gave the mech designers more advice on how to make the best use of the SF-02 given their limited quotas.

This way, the mech designers should be adequately equipped to pass the implicit test that came with the latest rule changes.

If the subordinate mech designers still failed to meet their work obligations after all of that, then Gloriana would definitely transfer them away from the Design Department.

She had already done so in the past when it came to assistant mech designers who were originally third-raters.

Regardless of whether they had joined the clan in the early days and consistently remained loyal, Gloriana did not want her department to get dragged down by incompetence.

She did not expect for any of the low-ranking mech designers to match her pace of improvement. No mech designer was more perfect than her as far as she was concerned.

What she did expect from her subordinates was for them to be able to remain useful to her as she continued to progress. She saw no value in retaining mech designers who were unable to work with transphasic components or who did not know how to handle the most basic work assignments related to first-class mech design projects.

The Miracle Couple's high pace of development was a constant source of stress to the majority of workers of the Design Department. They did not want to get kicked out of this holy land, but their poor foundations were dragging them down.

If neither augmentations nor systematic cultivation could make them smart and knowledgeable enough to assist in any ongoing advanced mech design project, then they had no place in the Design Department anymore.

Gloriana secretly hoped to sweep these old-timers aside and fill up the vacancies with more competent and well-educated first-class and second-class mech designers.