By analogy, if humans were like current AIs, then humans would be able to do some narrow bits of founding and running companies by ourselves, but we would need some intelligent non-human entity (angels?) to repeatedly intervene, assign tasks to us humans, and keep the larger project on track.
Incidentally, isn’t this true of most humans?
Almost everyone in the economy has a manager who has the role of asigning tasks and keeping the larger project on track. Some humans seem to have the capability to found and run large scale projects without recourse to anyone but their own orientating and reasoning, but not most humans.
Yeah to some extent, although that can be a motivation problem as well as a capability problem. Depends on how large is the “large scale project”.
I think almost all humans can and do “autonomously” execute projects that are well beyond today’s LLMs. I picked a hard example (founding and growing a company to $1B/year revenue) just for clarity.
Random website says 10% of the USA workforce (and 50% of the global workforce!?) is self-employed.
I think a big difference between functional organizations and dysfunctional bureaucracies is that the employees at functional organizations are aware of the larger project and how their work fits into it, and want the larger project to succeed, and act accordingly. So even if those people have a manager, it’s kinda a different relationship.
I think it depends on the context. It’s the norm for employees in companies to have managers though as @Steven Byrnes said, this is partially for motivational purposes since the incentives of employees are often not fully aligned with those of the company. So this example is arguably more of an alignment than a capability problem.
I can think of some other examples of humans acting in highly autonomous ways:
To the best of my knowledge, most academics and PhD students are expected to publish novel research in a highly autonomous way.
Novelists can work with a lot of autonomy when writing a book (though they’re a minority).
There are also a lot of personal non-work goals like saving for retirement or raising kids which require high autonomy over a long period of time.
Small groups of people like a startup can work autonomously for years without going off the rails like a group of LLMs probably would after a while (e.g. the Claude bliss attractor).
Incidentally, isn’t this true of most humans?
Almost everyone in the economy has a manager who has the role of asigning tasks and keeping the larger project on track. Some humans seem to have the capability to found and run large scale projects without recourse to anyone but their own orientating and reasoning, but not most humans.
Yeah to some extent, although that can be a motivation problem as well as a capability problem. Depends on how large is the “large scale project”.
I think almost all humans can and do “autonomously” execute projects that are well beyond today’s LLMs. I picked a hard example (founding and growing a company to $1B/year revenue) just for clarity.
Random website says 10% of the USA workforce (and 50% of the global workforce!?) is self-employed.
I think a big difference between functional organizations and dysfunctional bureaucracies is that the employees at functional organizations are aware of the larger project and how their work fits into it, and want the larger project to succeed, and act accordingly. So even if those people have a manager, it’s kinda a different relationship.
I think it depends on the context. It’s the norm for employees in companies to have managers though as @Steven Byrnes said, this is partially for motivational purposes since the incentives of employees are often not fully aligned with those of the company. So this example is arguably more of an alignment than a capability problem.
I can think of some other examples of humans acting in highly autonomous ways:
To the best of my knowledge, most academics and PhD students are expected to publish novel research in a highly autonomous way.
Novelists can work with a lot of autonomy when writing a book (though they’re a minority).
There are also a lot of personal non-work goals like saving for retirement or raising kids which require high autonomy over a long period of time.
Small groups of people like a startup can work autonomously for years without going off the rails like a group of LLMs probably would after a while (e.g. the Claude bliss attractor).