Comment by Ironchefpython | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ironchefpython | Hacker News Reader

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> metric-driven companies can go off the rails

Any publicly traded corporation (save a small handful with a non-traditional governance model) are metric-driven companies.

Modern corporations are paperclip maximizer functions executing on a network general-purpose biological computational engines tied together with powerpoint and email and excel spreadsheets.

Want to know what the AI of the future will look like? It will be a lot like Comcast, because it will be built by Comcast and harnessed to the corporate goals of Comcast and thus will have the same value system as Comcast.

The only thing it will lack is Comcast's institutional incompetence, as it will be Comcast's goals executing on dedicated hardware and not semi-autonomous employees. And it will build a dedicated model of every man and woman on the planet, and use that information to build a personalized profile that will determine exactly how many illegitimate charges it can cram on your bill before you'll suffer through a customized cancellation service that is calibrated to your personality and mental state to be just painful enough to drive you to the brink of suicide. And the only reason it's merely to be brink, is because a dead customer is an unprofitable one. (and if you think that's hyperbole, you have a far brighter view of the future than I do)

If I may quote from the rulebook for Fantasy Flight Games's New Angeles board game (go play it, it's awesome!)

There’s something they used to call ‘the Myth of Shareholder Value.’ It goes, basically, like this: everything any corporate officer does, at any level, must be dedicated to only one thing, which is to increase shareholder value.

...

The Weyland Consortium are the high priests of the cult of Shareholder Value in today’s economy. The Consortium is less a corporation and more an algorithm, buying and selling corporations and extending its tendrils out through every sector of industry: research, transportation, you name it. The Consortium moves and acts like a living thing. No one executive or committee steers that ship. Shareholder Value is its only captain, and every decision made by its chief officers is pre-destined, an inevitable result of gears turning for decades, of market forces filtered through AIs running on corporate servers.

I don't expect it will go that far at all. Surely a company will test the idea of having an AI give executive-level guidance, but when it does so, it will be hastily dismantled. Companies do not structure themselves in the way they do and act the way they do timidly. The C-level executives are not worrying that they could be doing things better. You can see this clearly as essentially every single large company consciously and intentionally ignores research. There are over a thousand studies showing that open floor plan offices are abyssmal for productivity and actively reduce the profit a company earns. Any AI would tell the execs to have the majority of their workers work remotely, and give the few which remain in company facilities private offices. And the execs would summarily ignore it and cancel the project, declaring it a failure.

They have faith that they are doing the right thing. Research tells them they are not, and they either do not care, or, in my opinion, desperately guard their self image as a 'leader' over and above any concern for profit or long-term viability of the business. An AI would be permitted to take a strong role in making decisions for a company only insofar as it plays the role of toady, having been tweaked and misconfigured to ignore all facts which could result in it telling the executives that they are running 'their company' in the wrong way.

But what about a new company being ruled by an AI? Surely it would be more efficient and make more money that competitors, eventually displacing them?

Only as far as efficiency can displace entrenched companies anywhere. That is, almost universally not, but it will happen in enough places to make some difference.

Why new companies run by competent people don't displace current companies today?

> I don't expect it will go that far at all. Surely a company will test the idea of having an AI give executive-level guidance, but when it does so, it will be hastily dismantled.

No, the AI won't be in charge. It won't set the overall goals. But it will be the truck drivers, the call center workers, the customer service specialists, the personal banking advisers.

When humans are told by the CEO of Wells Fargo, "you need to open 8 new banking accounts per day (because 8 rhymes with great) and we totally don't want you to cram unwanted products into existing customer portfolios, because that would be wrong wink-wink-nudge-nudge", most Wells Fargo employees are going understand what's being said (especially when they are disciplined for not acting illegally), and do the thing that their CEO tells them to do.

An AI given a fitness function to "open the maximum number of accounts, with a minimum probably of being caught performing illegal activity" is going to fuck over banking customers with a far more ruthless efficiency.

And I thought I was pessimistic. I must be missing something, how did we go from a faulty code, to KPIs, to Comcast paving the future of the AI?

> how did we go from a faulty code

The code in the example isn't faulty. The goals are faulty in an non-obvious way, and drives the AI to optimize a solution to a fitness function in a way that humans might consider pathological behavior.

> to Comcast paving the future of the AI?

Comcast's goals are faulty in a non-obvious way. Comcast's goals are to maximize shareholder profit, and in doing so creates a culture of fraudulent billing and a horrifying gauntlet of a cancellation process that humans might consider pathological behavior. And AI is the next logical step to optimizing those corporate values.

> Comcast's goals are to maximize shareholder profit

It's nitpicking, but no, no big company has the goal of maximizing shareholder profit.

Most have the goal of maximizing board members profit, what is mostly aligned, but different in a non-obvious way from maximizing shareholder profit.

> Comcast paving the future of the AI?

I think the core point is that corporations are fairly general-purpose machines, designed to do things too "big" for individual people. (But smaller and easier to analyze than "civilization.")

Their hardware stack is different, but lessons about their computational structure and design pitfalls may be applicable.

hug Good thing we still have pitchforks. AI can't wield a pitchfork.

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