The Ballroom Becomes a Throughput Problem

After a formal social event, Höss tells Hedwig that from the balcony he was preoccupied with how he would gas everyone in the ballroom, noting that its high ceiling would make the logistics difficult.

Höss’s planning ability remains technically competent while being morally abhorrent. His professional objective has become such a dominant interpretive frame that a festive room automatically appears as a capacity-planning problem.

Höss is an ideologically committed perpetrator, not an AI suffering goal misgeneralization. The analogy concerns the independence of capability from moral worth and the consequences of alignment to an evil institution.