That’s a good question. There are trivial senses in which Wal-Mart could become ‘superintelligent’ if sufficiently powerful emulations or AIs joined the organization. So I gather we’re interested in:
Are there plausible ways for an organization to rapidly become an invincible singleton without recourse to AI or emulations? (And without just attaining de-facto-dominance by peacefully subsuming rivals, like a World Government.)
If certain kinds of organization rapidly became an invincible singleton via AI or emulation technologies, would their peculiarities importantly change the strategic picture?
Re 1, if a single organization invents (and successfully monopolizes) a technology that quickly gives it vastly more wealth (or vastly more destructive power) than the entire rest of the planet, it could attain a dominant advantage even if it isn’t technically exploding in ‘general intelligence’. (The advantage might not count as ‘general’ because it’s a single narrow superpower that just happens to be strong enough to trump every other agency. Or it might not count as ‘intelligence’ because it’s a resource advantage rather than an intrinsic capability.)
Closer to the spirit of ‘intelligence explosion’ would be an organization that comes up with a clever way to biologically enhance its humans (e.g., an amazing new nootropic) or enhance the speed with which humans share information or filter out bad ideas. All of these examples, like the ones in the previous paragraph, rely on there being a huge first-mover advantage—either it’s easy to hide the necessary insights from other organizations, or at some threshold point the insights have an enormous effect on an extremely small timescale, or other organizations for some reason don’t want to mimic the first one. (Perhaps the game-changing technology is extremely taboo, and the invincible singleton arises because only one organization is willing to break the taboo within the first few years of the tech’s availability.)
I think there are two fairly distinct questions: whether an organization is likely to rapidly become much more superintelligent than it is, and whether it is likely to do this without other organizations catching up. I mostly mean to ask about the first.
You mention several improvements an organization could make to their intelligence, however in an ‘intelligence explosion’ presumably there would be lots of improvements one after the other. I’m thinking of the kinds of things you mention, along with improving the nature of interactions and what individual humans do in the organization etc—there seem to be many possibilities. However I don’t mean to reason from the promisingness of any of these to the conclusion that there could be an organizational intelligence explosion. I rather mean to point out that the arguments for an AI intelligence explosion seems to apply just as well to other kinds of entity such as organizations, since they don’t seem make any reference to being a software agent. So if you (reasonably, I think) don’t expect human organizations to undergo an ‘intelligence explosion’ soon, you need a story about how the argument does apply to AI but doesn’t apply to organizations. I don’t think such stories are that hard to come by, but it is good to think about.
That’s a good question. There are trivial senses in which Wal-Mart could become ‘superintelligent’ if sufficiently powerful emulations or AIs joined the organization. So I gather we’re interested in:
Are there plausible ways for an organization to rapidly become an invincible singleton without recourse to AI or emulations? (And without just attaining de-facto-dominance by peacefully subsuming rivals, like a World Government.)
If certain kinds of organization rapidly became an invincible singleton via AI or emulation technologies, would their peculiarities importantly change the strategic picture?
Re 1, if a single organization invents (and successfully monopolizes) a technology that quickly gives it vastly more wealth (or vastly more destructive power) than the entire rest of the planet, it could attain a dominant advantage even if it isn’t technically exploding in ‘general intelligence’. (The advantage might not count as ‘general’ because it’s a single narrow superpower that just happens to be strong enough to trump every other agency. Or it might not count as ‘intelligence’ because it’s a resource advantage rather than an intrinsic capability.)
Closer to the spirit of ‘intelligence explosion’ would be an organization that comes up with a clever way to biologically enhance its humans (e.g., an amazing new nootropic) or enhance the speed with which humans share information or filter out bad ideas. All of these examples, like the ones in the previous paragraph, rely on there being a huge first-mover advantage—either it’s easy to hide the necessary insights from other organizations, or at some threshold point the insights have an enormous effect on an extremely small timescale, or other organizations for some reason don’t want to mimic the first one. (Perhaps the game-changing technology is extremely taboo, and the invincible singleton arises because only one organization is willing to break the taboo within the first few years of the tech’s availability.)
I think there are two fairly distinct questions: whether an organization is likely to rapidly become much more superintelligent than it is, and whether it is likely to do this without other organizations catching up. I mostly mean to ask about the first.
You mention several improvements an organization could make to their intelligence, however in an ‘intelligence explosion’ presumably there would be lots of improvements one after the other. I’m thinking of the kinds of things you mention, along with improving the nature of interactions and what individual humans do in the organization etc—there seem to be many possibilities. However I don’t mean to reason from the promisingness of any of these to the conclusion that there could be an organizational intelligence explosion. I rather mean to point out that the arguments for an AI intelligence explosion seems to apply just as well to other kinds of entity such as organizations, since they don’t seem make any reference to being a software agent. So if you (reasonably, I think) don’t expect human organizations to undergo an ‘intelligence explosion’ soon, you need a story about how the argument does apply to AI but doesn’t apply to organizations. I don’t think such stories are that hard to come by, but it is good to think about.