Viliam_Bur comments on Intelligence explosion in organizations, or why I'm not worried about the singularity - Less Wrong

13 Post author: sbenthall 27 December 2012 04:32AM

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Comment author: Viliam_Bur 06 January 2013 01:09:46PM *  1 point [-]

Human minds contain a large number of interconnected specialized subsystems, in an organization humans would be the subsystems.

In a company large enough, the humans would be like the cells, and the departments would be the subsystems. The functional difference between e.g. the accounting department and the private security department can be big, even if both are composed of biologically almost the same homo sapiens individuals.

When comparing the speed of organizations with speed of humans, on different scales the speed comparison can be different. As an analogy, a bacterium can reproduce faster than a human, but a human will write a book faster. Similarly, humans can do many things faster than organizations, but some other things are just out of reach for an individual human without an organization of some kind.

I would say that today, humans are relatively advanced in the human-space, shaped by biological evolution and culture for a long long time. Compared with that, organizations seem rather primitive and fragile in the organization-space. Yet even today the organizations can do things that individual humans can't. It is like looking at the first multi-cellular organisms and deciding that although they have some small advantages over the single-cellular ones, they are not impressive enough.