Comment by atq2119

Comment by atq2119 3 days ago

9 replies

> LLMs are humanity's "first contact" with non-animal intelligence.

I'd say corporations are also a form of non-animal intelligence, so it's not exactly first contact. In some ways, LLMs are less alien, in other ways they're more.

There is an alignment problem for both of them. Perhaps the lesson to be drawn from the older alien intelligence is that the most impactful aspect of alignment is how the AI's benefits for humanity are distributed and how they impact politics.

eikenberry 3 days ago

I disagree. Corporations are a form of a collective intelligence, or group-think, which is decidedly biological or "animal", just like herding, flocking, hive-minds, etc.

  • fulafel 3 days ago

    It could be like flocking if they were free to do what the members collectively want to do (without things like "maximize shareholder value").

    • eikenberry 2 days ago

      Couldn't the regulations just be viewed as environmental changes that the entities would need to adapt to?

ACCount37 3 days ago

I don't agree entirely, but I do think that "corporation" is a decent proxy of what you can expect from a moderately powerful AI.

It's not going to be "a smart human". It's closer to "an entire office tower worth of competence, capability and attention".

Unlike human corporations, an AI may not be plagued by all the "corporate rot" symptoms - degenerate corporate culture, office politics, CYA, self-interest and lack of fucks given at every level. Currently, those internal issues are what keeps many powerful corporations in check.

This makes existing corporations safer than they would otherwise be. If all of those inefficiencies were streamlined away? Oh boy.

  • cgio 3 days ago

    These inefficiencies are akin to having some “wrong” weights in a huge model. Corporations also average over their individual contributions, positive or negative. And negative feedback loops may be individually detrimental but collectively optimising.

    • ACCount37 2 days ago

      Not really.

      Human flaws permeate the entire body of a corporation. The scale may average out some of it, but humans are not just randomly flawed - they're also systematically flawed on the top of it, and averaging does little to counter that.

      And the "top end" of the corporation doesn't have enough averaging to mitigate even the random flaws. If someone in the C-suite makes the dumbest decisions ever, the entire system may suffer immense damage before it corrects - if it ever does.

4er_transform 3 days ago

Also: democracy, capitalism/the global economy, your HOA, a tribe, etc etc

Even a weather system is a kind of computational process and “intelligent” in a way