"Do we need a theory of mind article to link to ..."

https://arbital.com/p/8hr

by Brian Muhia Jul 6 2017


Corporations generally exhibit infrahuman, par\-human, or high\-human levels of ability on non\-heavily\-parallel tasks\. On cognitive tasks that parallelize well across massive numbers of humans being paid to work on them, corporations exhibit superhuman levels of ability compared to an individual human\. In order to try and grasp the overall performance boost from organizing into a corporation, consider a Microsoft\-sized corporation trying to play Go in 2010\. The corporation could potentially pick out its strongest player and so gain high\-human performance, but would probably not play very far above that individual level, and so would not be able to defeat the individual world champion\. Consider also the famous chess game of Kasparov vs\. The World, which Kasparov ultimately won\. On massively parallel cognitive tasks, corporations exhibit strongly superhuman performance; the best passenger aircraft designable by Boeing seems likely to be far superior to the best passenger aircraft that could be designed by a single engineer at Boeing\. In virtue of being composed of humans, corporations have most of the advanced\-agent properties that humans themselves do: They can deploy general intelligence and cross\-domain consequentialism\. They possess big\-picture strategic awareness and operate in the real\-world domain\. They can deploy realistic psychological models of humans and try to deceive them\. Also in virtue of being composed of humans, corporations are not in general Vingean\-unpredictable, hence not systematically cognitively uncontainable\. Without constituent researchers who know secret phenomena of a domain, corporations are not strongly cognitively uncontainable\. Corporations are not epistemically efficient relative to humans, except perhaps in limited domains for the extremely few such that have deployed internal prediction markets with sufficiently high participation and subsidy\. \(The stock prices of large corporations are efficient, but the corporations aren't; often the stock price tanks after the corporation does something stupid\.\) Corporations are not instrumentally efficient\. No currently known method exists for aggregating human strategic acumen into an instrumentally efficient conglomerate the way that prediction markets try to do for epistemic predictions about near\-term testable events\. It is often possible for a human to see a better strategy for accomplishing the corporation's pseudo\-goals than the corporation is pursuing\. Corporations generally exhibit little interest in fundamental cognitive self\-improvement, e\.g\. extremely few of them have deployed internal prediction markets \(perhaps since the predictions of these internal prediction markets are often embarrassing to overconfident managers\)\. Since corporate intelligence is almost entirely composed of humans, most of the basic algorithms running a corporation are not subject to improvement by the corporation\. Attempts to do crude analogues of this tend to, e\.g\., bog down the entire corporation in bureaucracy and internal regulations, rather than resulting in genetic engineering of better executives or an intelligence explosion\. Corporations have no basic speed advantage over their constituent humans, since speed does not parallelize\.

Do we need a theory of mind article to link to here, or is a highlight sufficient?