My sense is that these are not fundamental components of a rationally applied bureaucratic structure, but rather of the limited information and communication capabilities of the agents that hold the positions within the bureaucratic structure. My sense is that AIs could overcome these challenges given some flexibility in structure based on some weighted voting mechanism by the AIs.
I think this is the essential question that needs to be answered: Is the stratification of bureaucracies a result of the fixed limit on human cognitive capacity, or is it an inherent limitation of bureaucracy?
One way to answer such a question might be to look at the asymptotics of the situation. Suppose that the number of “rules” governing an organization is proportional to the size of the organization. The question would then be does the complexity of the coordination problem also increase only linearly as well? If so, it is reasonable to suppose that humans (with a finite capacity) would face a coordination problem but AI would not.
Suppose instead that the complexity of the coordination problem increases with the square of organization size. In this case, as the size of an organization grows, AI might find the coordination harder and harder, but still tractable.
Finally, what if the AI must consider all possible interactions between all possible rules in order to resolve the coordination problem? In this case, the complexity of “fixing” a stratified bureaucracy is exponential in the size of the bureaucracy and beyond a certain (slowly rising) threshold the coordination problem is intractable.
My sense is that AIs could overcome these challenges given some flexibility in structure based on some weighted voting mechanism by the AIs.
If weighted voting is indeed a solution to the problem of bureaucratic stratification, we would expect this to be true of both human and AI organizations. In this case, great effort should be put into discovering such structures because they would be of use in the present and not only in our AI dominated future.
It’s not clear to me that if the bureaucratic norms and training could be updated for better rules and regulation to be imposed upon it why it would need to be overthrown.
Suppose the coordination problem is indeed intractable. That is to say that once a bureaucracy has become sufficiently complex it is impossible to reduce the complexity of the system without unpredictable and undesirable side-effects. In this case, the optimal solution may be the one chosen by capitalism (and revolutionaries) to periodically replace the bureaucracy once it is no longer near the efficiency frontier .
I would suggest that market competition and bureaucratic structure are along a continuum of structures for effectively and efficiently processing information.
There is undoubtedly a continuum of solutions between “survival of the fittest” capitalistic competition and “rules abiding” bureaucratic management. The discovery of new “points” on this continuum (for example bureaucracy with capitalist characteristics) is something that deserves in-depth study.
To take one example, the Bezos Mandate aims to structure communication between teams at Amazon more like a marketplace and less like a bureaucracy. Google’s 20% time is another example of purposely reducing management overhead in order to foster innovation.
It would be awesome if one could “fine tune” the level of competitiveness and thereby choose any point on this continuum. If this were possible, one might even be able to use control theory to dynamically change the trade-off over time in order to maximize utility.
I think this is the essential question that needs to be answered: Is the stratification of bureaucracies a result of the fixed limit on human cognitive capacity, or is it an inherent limitation of bureaucracy?
One way to answer such a question might be to look at the asymptotics of the situation. Suppose that the number of “rules” governing an organization is proportional to the size of the organization. The question would then be does the complexity of the coordination problem also increase only linearly as well? If so, it is reasonable to suppose that humans (with a finite capacity) would face a coordination problem but AI would not.
Suppose instead that the complexity of the coordination problem increases with the square of organization size. In this case, as the size of an organization grows, AI might find the coordination harder and harder, but still tractable.
Finally, what if the AI must consider all possible interactions between all possible rules in order to resolve the coordination problem? In this case, the complexity of “fixing” a stratified bureaucracy is exponential in the size of the bureaucracy and beyond a certain (slowly rising) threshold the coordination problem is intractable.
If weighted voting is indeed a solution to the problem of bureaucratic stratification, we would expect this to be true of both human and AI organizations. In this case, great effort should be put into discovering such structures because they would be of use in the present and not only in our AI dominated future.
Suppose the coordination problem is indeed intractable. That is to say that once a bureaucracy has become sufficiently complex it is impossible to reduce the complexity of the system without unpredictable and undesirable side-effects. In this case, the optimal solution may be the one chosen by capitalism (and revolutionaries) to periodically replace the bureaucracy once it is no longer near the efficiency frontier .
There is undoubtedly a continuum of solutions between “survival of the fittest” capitalistic competition and “rules abiding” bureaucratic management. The discovery of new “points” on this continuum (for example bureaucracy with capitalist characteristics) is something that deserves in-depth study.
To take one example, the Bezos Mandate aims to structure communication between teams at Amazon more like a marketplace and less like a bureaucracy. Google’s 20% time is another example of purposely reducing management overhead in order to foster innovation.
It would be awesome if one could “fine tune” the level of competitiveness and thereby choose any point on this continuum. If this were possible, one might even be able to use control theory to dynamically change the trade-off over time in order to maximize utility.