A brief history of the automated corporation

By Owen Cotton-Barratt @ 2024-11-04T14:37 (+21)

This is a linkpost to https://strangecities.substack.com/p/a-brief-history-of-the-automated

Looking back from 2041

When people in the early 21st Century imagined an AI-empowered economy, they tended to project person-like AI entities doing the work. “There will be demand for agent-like systems,” they argued, “so we’ll see AI labs making agents which can then be deployed to various problems”.

We now know that that isn’t how it played out. But what led to the largely automated corporations that we see today? Let’s revisit the history:

Today, there are a few instances of fully autonomous corporations, with no human control even in theory, as well as a larger number of fully autonomous AI agents, generally created by hobbyists or activists. However, while intriguing (and suggestive about how the future might unfold), to date these remain a tiny fraction.

And although AI for research has been one of the slower applications to find a niche for properly automated groups (with many cases of AI used at the management level coordinating human researchers, who in turn make use of AI research assistants; although this varies by field), it still appears to have made a difference. On most measures, technological progress was around 1.5–2x faster in the period 2030–2035, compared to a decade earlier (2020–2025), and the second half of the 2030s was faster again. Moreover, in the last couple of years we have been seeing an increase in successes out of purely automated research groups. A controversial AI-produced paper published in Science earlier this year claimed that the rate of technological progress is now ten times faster than it was at the turn of the century. Since IJ Good first coined the idea of an intelligence explosion, 75 years ago last year, people have wondered if we will someday see a blistering rate of progress, that is hard to wrap our heads around. Perhaps we are, finally, standing on the cusp — and the automated corporations we have developed stand ready to work, integrating the fruits of that explosion back into human society.

Remarks

As is perhaps obvious: this is not a prediction that this is how the future will play out. Rather, it’s an exploration of one way that it might play out — and of some of the challenges that might arise if it did. 

Thanks to Raymond Douglas, Max Dalton, and Tom Davidson, and Adam Bales, for helpful comments.


Chris Leong @ 2025-01-20T04:01 (+4)

I guess a key question is how much we should expect AI development to recurse back in on itself. The stronger this effect is, the shorter the time period in which it might be optimal to deploy AI in this fashion. In fact, it's possible that the transition time could be so short that this paradigm becomes hot, then almost immediately becomes outdated. 

"Management" consists of many different tasks, I don't expect all of them to be automatable at the exact same time. As an example, there's likely a big difference between an AI that manages project timelines or decides how to allocate tasks and one that defines the high-level strategy, both in terms of availability of the training data and how well it needs to perform in order to be deployed (many smaller company's that can't afford a project manager would be keen to make-do with an automated one even if it isn't as good as a professional would be).