Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Genetically perfecting the new worker

It's still a mystery as to why people need to sleep.  It does not appear to serve much of a function other than to waste nearly a third of life lying in a bed.  Wouldn't it be great if less sleep (or even no sleep!) was necessary?  People could work longer hours and get more stuff done.

Well, it turns out that the amount of sleep a person needs is genetically controlled.  At the moment, only 3% of the population seems to have the gene that allows them to thrive on 5-6 hours of sleep a day.  So far, genetic engineering has been focused on improving food crops and curing certain rare debilitating diseases.  That's all fine and good, but to have a bigger impact, we should start finding a way to genetically engineer our next generation of workers to require less sleep.  With the huge economic benefit of a workforce which sleeps less and works more, we should be devoting a lot more resources engineering a more wakeful workforce.

Until that breakthrough happens though, the PHB can still induce caffeinated productivity in his employees and try screening for the non-sleepers during hiring.

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Joseph M. Scandura, incompetent moron, idiot, pompous, stupid, failure, asshole, arrogant, bullshit, micromanager of the year, technologically clueless, ignorant, condescending, senile, dementia

scandura@scandura.com
mailto:joescandura@comcast.net