In the last half century, there has been a torrent of new laws and principles in medicine, economics, business, the sciences, and, of course, the legal system. None astonishes me more than Moore’s Law formulated by Gordon E. Moore in 1965. A cofounder of Intel, Moore contended that the number of transistors that could be economically loaded on an integrated circuit would double about every two years. The Caltech PhD was right as rain, and so appreciative of the good schooling he got that he and his wife have since enriched Caltech by a crisp $600 million, the biggest donation in history to a college or university.

What’s so peachy about Moore’s Law? Moore is describing the enormous increase in memory within computers, cars, phones, and nearly every other gadget we use. The most incredible thing of all: Moore’s Law is expected to continue to prevail until the year 2015.

In case somebody hasn’t formulated it yet—and somebody may well have done so—let me throw a new one at you. I’ll call it Mackay’s Law, and it works this way: Take the number of people in your department. Let’s say it’s twenty-five. My projection is, in five years, that number is likely to be fifteen. That means an average attrition rate of two bodies a year.

Moore’s Law is part of the reason. As computer memory skyrockets, not only does the volume of machine-made calculations increase, the complexity of things computers can do will also multiply . . . and in amazing ways. If a Toyota robotic trumpeter can already belt out a flawless version of “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” you can be sure unimaginable labor- and management-savings technology is headed our way. The innovations will be over the moon! They will slay us . . . literally . . . at the rate of two per year in the workplace.

Keeping your job will be a lot like navigating a Survivor obstacle course in reality TV. In Greek mythology, mighty Hercules had to perform twelve labors of repentance. One of the labors of Hercules was death defying, like bringing back Cerberus, the vicious multiheaded guard dog of Hades. And he had to do it bare-handed. A second labor was to wash out the biggest, rankest cattle stalls found in glorious old Greece. Suicide mission . . . and sloughing through deep doo-doo. Sounds like “all in a day’s work” for the modern manager.

© The New Yorker Collection 2009 Robert Mankoff from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.