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gwern comments on Superintelligence Reading Group 3: AI and Uploads - Less Wrong
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Not quite. My point here is that human-based corporations have several flaws which I think cumulatively bar any major amount of self-improvement: they can't perpetuate or replicate themselves very well which bars self-improvement or evolving better versions of themselves (because they are made of squishy parts like pieces of paper and humans; there is nothing remotely equivalent to 'DNA' or 'source code' for a corporation which could be copied with high fidelity), and if they did, their treacherous components (humans) would steal any gains.
If you could make a corporation out of something more reliable and concrete like computer programming, and if you could replace the treacherous components with more trustworthy components, then the Goodian loop seems possible to me. Of course, at that point, one would just consider the corporation as a whole to be an intelligence with perhaps a slightly exotic decentralized architecture of highly-powered neural networks glued together by some framework code, like how a human brain can be seen as a number of somewhat independent regions glued together by networks of neurons, and it would just be a special case of the original Goodian loop 'Since the design of another [intelligence] is an activity...'.
Franchising seems to work fairly well. Although I suppose that's slightly different: you have one entity whose business it is to create and promote a highly reliable and reproducible business model, and then a whole bunch of much smaller entities running that model and sending kickbacks to the parent company. But the parent's business model and its children's don't have much in common.
Are there any franchise-like organizations that spread peer to peer? I don't know of any, but this isn't my field.
Franchising isn't that common - I only seem to hear of it in the food industry, anyway. It seems to be good for a few simple niches where uniformity (predictability) is itself valued by customers at the expense of quality.
Now I've got a wild idea for a burger joint that optimizes its business model using genetic programming methods.
Even if franchising only arises in specific demand circumstances, it suggests that it is possible to replicate a business more-or-less, and that there are other reasons why it isn't done more often. And for some kind of evolution, you don't really need a peer to peer spreading franchise - if the parent organization creates new offshoots more like the ones that went better last time, you would have the same effect, and I bet they do.
Also, I don't think replication is required in the Good argument - merely being able to create a new entity which is more effective than you.
No, it suggests it's possible to replicate a few particular businesses with sufficient success. (If the franchisee fails, that's not a big problem for the franchiser.) The examples I know of are all fairly simple businesses like fast food. Their exceptionality in this respect means they are the exception which proves the rule.
All startups (by Paul Graham's definition) rely on massively replicating a successful business element, for example.
The boundaries of a firm are, in certain ways, arbitrary. A firm can "replicate" by selling franchises, but it can also replicate by opening new offices, new factories, etc.
Some examples: the big four accounting firms, test prep, offshore drilling, cell service infrastructure...