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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

But why are these sort of orgs slow and useless? I don't think it is because they have made a conscious decision to do so - I think it is more than they do not have the resources to do anything else. They can't afford to hire in huge teams of engineers and product managers and researchers to modernize their systems.

If suddenly the NHS had a team of "free" genuinely phd-level AGI engineers working 24/7 they'd make a bunch of progress on the low-hanging fruit and modernize and fix a whole bunch of stuff pretty rapidly I expect.

Of course the devil here is the requirements and integrations (human and otherwise). AGI engineers might be able to churn out fantastic code (some day at least), but we still need to work out the requirements and someone still needs to make decisions on how things are done. Decision making is often the worst/slowest thing in large orgs (especially public sector).

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It's not a resource problem; everyone inside the system has no real incentive to do anything innovative; improving something incrementally is more likely to be seen as extra work by your colleagues and be detrimental to the person who implemented it.

What's more likely is a significantly better system is introduced somewhere, NHS can't keep up and is rebuilt by an external. (Or more likely it becomes a inferior system of a lesser nation as the UK continues its decline).

I think this is where the AGI employee succeeds where other automation doesn’t. The AGI employee doesn’t require the organization to change. It’s an agent that functions like a regular employee in the same exact system with all of its inefficiencies, except that it can do way more inefficient work for a fraction of the cost of a human.

Assuming we get to AGI and companies are willing to employ them in lieu of a human employee, why would they stop at only replacing small pieces of the org rather than replacing it entirely with AGI?

AGI, by most definitions at least, would be better than most people at most things. Especially if you take OpenAI's definition, which boils it down only to economic value, a company would seemingly always be better off replacing everything with AGI.

Maybe more likely. AGI would just create superior businesses from scratch and put human companies out if business.

Extrapolating this, I cannot help but imagine a dystopian universe in which humans' reason for existence is to be some uber AI's pets.

This is a huge selling point, and it will really differentiate the orgs that adopt it from those who don’t. Eventually the whole organization will become as inscrutable as the agents that operate it. From the executive point of view this is indistinguishable from having human knowledge workers. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens to an organization like that when it faces disruptive threats that require rapid changes to its operating model. Many human orgs fall apart faced by this kind of challenge. How will an extra jumbo pattern matcher do?

Don't forget that the executive is also a (human) employee. If AGI is working so well, why would the major stakeholders need a human CEO?

What you are describing is science fiction and is not worthy of serious discussion.

IMO it comes from inertia. People at the top are not digital-native. And they're definitely not AI-native.

So you're retrofitting a solution onto a legacy org. No one will have the will to go far enough fast enough. And if they didn't have the resources to engineer all these software migrations who will help them lead all these AI migrations?

Are they going to go hands off the wheels? Who is going to debug the inevitable fires in the black box that has now replaced all the humans?

And many of the users/consumers are not digital-native either. My dad is not going to go to a website to make appointments or otherwise interact with the healthcare system.

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