Parable of Talents

Some New Testament parables are weird, and I flat out disagree with many of them. I have real problems with the Prodigal Son and Workers in the Vineyard, for example. But the Parable of the Talents is interesting. It has a lot of ideas still relevant today. For example, to whom much is given, much is expected. The man who makes 5 talents and the man who makes 2 talents are treated exactly equally, despite one making 2.5 times more. This is because he was given 2.5 times more. Also, money is distributed based on ability, not heredity. Another, more uncomfortable message is that the rich get richer (through use of investment banking, no less!) and the poor get poorer. The rich invest what they are given while the poor does not for fear of losing the one piece of money and enraging the Master. So there are lots of interesting undertones still relevant today. The "Master" also seems to be a jerk in some sense. He says "I reap where I have not sown" which are basically the words of house Greyjoy in A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones), "We do not sow." (The Greyjoys are basically a bunch of ravaging pirates who refuse to value anything unless they killed someone over it--"Paid the iron price"). So creating this Master who demands much of his servants and reaps benefits he had no part in creating is interesting.

But what does any of this have to do with computer science? Perhaps the master is like managers, doling out resources based on ability and expecting returns. They're not directly sowing the fields, but organizing workers to sow them, and reaping the rewards. Those who are given few resources and fail to increase them are laid off, I suppose. Perhaps we are the masters and the computers are the resources; there's only so much time or computing power we can give each project, and if the project fails to deliver, it is terminated.

Perhaps this is more an example of results-oriented thinking. Rewarding people based on what they make, and not how they make it. This might be unethical in Computer Science, there are many ways to write terrible code that gets the job done, but is impossible to update and maintain. 

This parable even has a sense of Moore's law, that you should inherently be able to double what you are given, and doing less than that is failure. This field and the technology has been exploding over the past few decades, but it can't keep that up forever, right? Quantum physics says there is a limit to how small we can build things. Perhaps, in the parable, can the master really expect his servants to double his money every time? Surely they will sometimes fail and lose money, else he would soon become the richest man in all history (doubling money adds up really fast). But perhaps we are at the place in history, where we have seen a rapid increase in resources (computing power) over decades that cannot continue forever. This is like the master who sees most his servants doubling his money, and so he probably expects them to continue doing that, although realistically they cannot.