An organization could be viewed as a type of mind with extremely redundant modular structure. Human minds contain a large number of interconnected specialized subsystems, in an organization humans would be the subsystems. Comparing the two seems illuminating.
Individual subsystems of organizations are much more powerful and independent, making them very effective at scaling and multitasking. This is of limited value, though: it mostly just means organizations can complete parallelizable tasks faster.
Intersystem communication is horrendously inefficient in organizations: bandwidth is limited to speech/typing and latency can be hours. There are tradeoffs here: military and emergency response organizations cut the latency down to seconds, but that limits the types of tasks the subsystems can effectively perform. Humans suck at multitasking and handling interruptions. Communication patters and quality are more malleable, though. Organizations like Apple and Google have had some success in creating environments that leverage human social tendencies to improve on-task communication.
Specialization seems like a big one. Most humans are to some degree interchangeable: what one can do, most others can do less effectively, or at least learn given time. There are ways to improve individual specialization, but barring radical cultural or technological change, we’re pretty much stuck on that front.
Mostly organizations seem limited by the competence of their individual members. They do more, not better. Specialization and communication seem to be the limiting factors and I’m not sure if they can make enough of a difference even in theory to qualify as a superintelligence, except in the sense a sped-up human would.
Thoughts?
An interesting post. I immediately thought of asking “What habits would I adopt if the long-term effects were in full force immediately?”
I think I have some thinking to do.
Edit: typo.