Comment by buran77
5 years ago
Even if you take engineering you see that adding more links on a chain increases latency and demands more auxiliary circuitry. But at least in engineering you can design each part to do what you want it to do close to perfection. And it will scale better because you can build everything to spec and bin, which is why we automate a lot of tasks. With humans that can't happen. Human "binning" is a constantly moving target.
After tangentially working on this for a long time I'd say that the core issue is so deeply ingrained in human psyche that it may not even be a matter of education (starts early), let alone organization (starts happening when everything else is "set in stone"). There's no organizational structure that fits the types of activities we humans tend to do these days and that can deliver low latency, consistent results at scale. We mitigate issues in one area by accentuating them in others.
You can have one large flat structure but the load on the single coordinating circuit (the manager) will compromise quality. You can split the thing in multiple, individually coordinated units but the added layer of coordination and latency will compromise performance.
Maybe some form of general purpose but not quite full AI, something that combines human like intelligence and engineering like consistency, might be able to do what humans are supposed to but without the variability of humans (which is both good and bad).
Introducing AI into work relations is how you turn every org into Uber or Amazon delivery: platforms where the worker has no real agency on his work, the apotheosis of alienation. I have no doubt that someone will try it (already we see it creeping in for hiring), I just think it will be Fundamentally Bad.
> Introducing AI into work relations is
We don't really know what it is simply because we haven't introduced any "real" AI anywhere, let alone:
>> some form of general purpose but not quite full AI
Talking about efficiency as you scale up large organizations, it's inevitable that humans will introduce delays and variability in the work which cannot be eliminated because it's human nature, biologically and psychologically. Since humans can't change on a timescale that makes this discussion relevant, the only way for very large organizations (like large companies or governments) to operate just as efficiently as small ones is if they rely (quasi)exclusively on some AI that's as capable as top individuals at delivering results but with fewer of the drawbacks. Not only would it not operate as 100.000 distinct entities but as one or a few, it would also run consistently and predictably.