group intelligence

There are some jobs where people earn more than twice the median income. This means that the employer thinks that the one person is more effective in the position than two average people would be. For some jobs, like CEO of large businesses, the pay is hundreds or thousands of times the median income (when you include bonuses.) Could we make a system where a hundred people could break down all the tasks of a CEO into parts simple enough for each of them to do and reassemble the results quickly enough to respond on the timescales a CEO needs to?
My guess is that it could be done, but that we don't know how to do it yet. (One big problem is that people can't transmit information to each other fast enough or accurately enough.) We don't understand intelligence well enough to divide it into a hundred subtasks, each done by a human. That's a big part of the problem with creating human level AI: even if we had subcomponents as intelligent as an average human, we wouldn't know how to arrange those components to make an exceptional human. But the AI problem deals with components that are roughly as smart as bugs, maybe really stupid fish. So we really don't know how to put those together into an intelligent system.

Comments

Anonymous said…
This is similar to your post on Jan.1, 2008.
D said…
Yes, these are ideas that I keep thinking about.

Who are you, anyway?

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