This is also relevant to understanding why the genre of off-the-cuff tossoffs like “what if corporations are the real superintelligence” or “why can’t we solve AGI alignment the same way we solved ‘aligning corporations’?” are so wrong.
Corporations are not superintelligences. They are, in fact, extremely stupid, much stupider than the sum of their parts (a million corporate employees sum to a lot less than a million times smarter human), suffer from severe diseconomies of scale, and subject to only the weakest forms of natural selection due to their inability to replicate themselves reliably leading to the permanent existence of very large dispersion in efficiency/quality between corporations. (You will never see a single especially-well-run corporation take over most of the business world, the way you repeatedly saw more-fit COVID viruses drive to extinction lesser variants.) They are so stupid that they cannot walk and chew bubblegum at the same time, and must choose, because they can only have 1 top priority at a time—and CEOs exist mostly to repeat the top priority that “we do X”.
Why then do we have corporations and they have any real-world power at all? Because they are simply very large and parallel and potentially-immortal, and are the least-bad organizations human minds can reliably form at present given the blackbox of human minds & inability to copy them. Not because they are optimal or intelligent.
This is also relevant to understanding why the genre of off-the-cuff tossoffs like “what if corporations are the real superintelligence” or “why can’t we solve AGI alignment the same way we solved ‘aligning corporations’?” are so wrong.
Corporations are not superintelligences. They are, in fact, extremely stupid, much stupider than the sum of their parts (a million corporate employees sum to a lot less than a million times smarter human), suffer from severe diseconomies of scale, and subject to only the weakest forms of natural selection due to their inability to replicate themselves reliably leading to the permanent existence of very large dispersion in efficiency/quality between corporations. (You will never see a single especially-well-run corporation take over most of the business world, the way you repeatedly saw more-fit COVID viruses drive to extinction lesser variants.) They are so stupid that they cannot walk and chew bubblegum at the same time, and must choose, because they can only have 1 top priority at a time—and CEOs exist mostly to repeat the top priority that “we do X”.
Why then do we have corporations and they have any real-world power at all? Because they are simply very large and parallel and potentially-immortal, and are the least-bad organizations human minds can reliably form at present given the blackbox of human minds & inability to copy them. Not because they are optimal or intelligent.
And given the SEC.