Wind comments on The Virtue of Narrowness - Less Wrong

56 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 August 2007 05:57PM

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Comment author: Chrysophylax 29 January 2013 07:21:43PM -1 points [-]

Large corporations are not really very like AIs at all. An Artificial Intelligence is an intelligence with a single utility function, whereas a company is a group of intelligences with many complex utility functions. I remain unconvinced that aggregating intelligences and applying the same terms is valid - it is, roughly speaking, like trying to apply chromodynamics to atoms and molecules. Maximising shareholder value is also not a simple problem to solve (if it were, the stock market would be a lot simpler!), especially since "shareholder value" is a very vague concept. In reality, large corporations almost never seek to maximise shareholder value (that is, in theory one might, but I can't actually imagine such a firm). The relevant terms to look up are "satisficing" and "principal-agent problem".

This rather spoils the idea of firms being intelligent - the term does not appear applicable (which is, I think, Eliezer's point).

Comment author: Wind 11 June 2016 10:01:26AM 1 point [-]

How said anything about AI?

Super Intelligence = A General intelligence, that is much smarter than any human.

I consider my self to be an intelligence, event though my mind is made of many sub-processes, and I don't have a stable coherent utility function (I am still working on that).

The relevant questions are: It is sometimes useful to model corporations as single agents? - I don't know. Are corporations much smarter than any human? - No, they are not.

I say "sometimes useful", because, some other time you would want to study the corporations internal structure, and then it is defiantly not useful to see it as one entity. But since there are no fundamental indivisible substance of intelligence, any intelligence will have internal parts. Therefore having internal parts can not be exclusive to being an intelligent agent.