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> A corporation is a system for maximizing a well-defined metric. Interesting theory. My perspective is that once a corporation thinks of itself that way, it's

> A corporation is a system for maximizing a well-defined metric. Interesting theory. My perspective is that once a corporation thinks of itself that way, it's already going downhill. Once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Now I assume you're imagining the well-defined metric to be profit, in attempt to dodge the aforementioned problem. However, even leaving aside the problem of short- vs long-term profit, I don't think that metric has a sufficiently well-defined link with actions to be optimized with anything we can build in the near term. There's too much "common sense" involved that, AFAICT, we still don't have any idea how to handle. Ed: I guess I sort of did the thing the OP told me not to. But I still don't think the ability to phrase the problem of running a corporation as "optimize profit" makes it likely to be accomplished sooner than any other AGI application.

XorNot 6y ago
Investors would go nuts betting on AI corporations which burned short and bright with huge returns in the meantime.
opportune 6y ago
But surely a general intelligence would recognize that maximizing short term profit at the expense of long term profits has its own set of trade offs. And indeed, that common sense or “je ne sais quoi” would also reasonably indicate general intelligence. I think the “running a corporation” problem is actually a great example of how to measure a general intelligence not only because it has well defined success criteria but also because of the very open ended and general means by which it must be accomplished. Running a corporation requires communication, setting goals, creativity, number crunching, and lots of soft skills like branding or understanding how consumers/customers will react to things. But there is nothing uniquely human about it except that it needs to be able to make money from humans. Presumably if I’m paying for some well defined service like Search Ads I don’t particularly care if the corporation is run by a robot. I do agree though that there is a bit of ambiguity here on what “run a corporation” means. I assume that with a lot of thought I could write a very procedural script that somehow incorporates, purchases a property, and rents it through a property management group.

XorNot 6y ago

Investors would go nuts betting on AI corporations which burned short and bright with huge returns in the meantime.

opportune 6y ago

But surely a general intelligence would recognize that maximizing short term profit at the expense of long term profits has its own set of trade offs. And indeed, that common sense or “je ne sais quoi” would also reasonably indicate general intelligence. I think the “running a corporation” problem is actually a great example of how to measure a general intelligence not only because it has well defined success criteria but also because of the very open ended and general means by which it must be accomplished. Running a corporation requires communication, setting goals, creativity, number crunching, and lots of soft skills like branding or understanding how consumers/customers will react to things. But there is nothing uniquely human about it except that it needs to be able to make money from humans. Presumably if I’m paying for some well defined service like Search Ads I don’t particularly care if the corporation is run by a robot. I do agree though that there is a bit of ambiguity here on what “run a corporation” means. I assume that with a lot of thought I could write a very procedural script that somehow incorporates, purchases a property, and rents it through a property management group.