alt Hacker NewsI really enjoyed this article, I didn't bridge the idea of an ATM and mobile banking.
I think the idea raised about "Automated Firms" is a bit off in the picture painted in that linked article. I think the David Oks intention is to paint a picture of a fully automated company, but the linked article gives this impression:
> Future AI firms won’t be constrained by what's scarce or abundant in human skill distributions – they can optimize for whatever abilities are most valuable. Want Jeff Dean-level engineering talent? Cool: once you’ve got one, the marginal copy costs pennies. Need a thousand world-class researchers? Just spin them up. The limiting factor isn't finding or training rare talent – it's just compute.
In that above paragraph the author is saying to the reader that a human will be able to spin up and get these armies of intelligent workers, but at the end of the day their output is given to a human who presumably needs to take ownership of the result. Intelligent workers make bad choices or bad bets, but those AI machines cannot "own" an outcome. The responsibility must fall on a person.
To this end, I think the fully autonomous firm is kind of a fallacy. There needs to be someone who can be sued if anything goes wrong. You're not suing the AI.
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Also, employing “infinite intelligence” by splitting it into “workers” and organizing them into firms cannot be farther than a paradigm change.
It’s strictly an attempt to shoehorn the new tech into an existing paradigm, just because right now the system prompt makes an “agent” behave differently than the one with a different prompt.
It’s unimaginative to say the least.
That is why a fully automated firm would be a paradigm shift. Instead of requiring someone to be responsible and to QA things, you just let AI systems be responsible internally, and the company responsible as a whole for legal concerns.
This idea of an automated firm relies on the premise that AI will become more capable and reliable than people.