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).
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).