The middle management in companies is one of the worst inventions ever. I think baboons have better middle management structure than us.
Might as well replace all that.
"The famous primatologist Robert Sapolsky has spent decades studying baboons and has described how status, alliances, conflict resolution, and coalition-building resemble politics inside human organizations"
Baboons are a good example for studying mammal social management strategies, which humans also do.
They are organized by dominance hierrarchy, like humans, but baboons have a distributed leadership.
I think we could learn a lot from baboons when it comes to management
You know, as an IC, if I get get the level of introspection you can get from building distributed systems, and that with reasoning/thinking traces from LLMs, I think I'd prefer the entire level of middle management made out of LLMs rather than humans. It'd be helpful to be able to see exactly where their logic suddenly took a skip out the window.
But the author's vision is also suspect, if you assume that the models will become much more intelligent:
1. Hypothetically, we can't give every human their own personal SkyNet to command. That would, uh, probably end very badly. If everyone gets an agent, those agents can't be too capable?
2. If you do somehow build a model that's much smarter than you, what do you contribute by managing it? How many people here have ever worked for a well-intentioned manager who couldn't understand the people they managed? So in this scenario, human management would be mostly displaced by agent management. Most companies could lay almost everyone off and let the agents manage each other. We only need humans to manage models now because the models are still pretty broken.
3. If we create models that can genuinely replace humans at almost any task, you won't be able to buy those on the API. At that point, the billionaires and the politicians wouldn't need human workers any more, because everything can be done better using their pet agents. Just have the robots build stuff for the billionaires directly. And if any of the former human peons get upset about being locked out of the economy to starve, then have the agents pilot the drones, too.
Basically, almost none of the people imagining a future of superhuman intelligences have actually though through how it would actually work in the real world. We're going to spend trillions of dollars and vast amounts of resources chasing the goal of making ordinary humans obsolete. Now, that goal might be unobtainable, I hope. But I'm deeply alarmed at how much we're spending pursuing it.
Razengan•46m ago