Recently Google’s DeepMind released this paper suggesting that AGI: artificial general intelligence (which OpenAI is supposedly shipping this year 😏) may NOT emerge from a single powerful monolithic model like ChatGPT, but rather from a patchwork of agents which looks more like a network of intelligent bots making collective decisions, this feels more right to me. It goes on to outline new safety concerns and approaches that are implicated by this concept of “Patchwork AGI” but it also reminds me of Jeff Hawkins’s theory of A Thousand Brains which states that human intelligence also stems from more of a collective effort, and that our thoughts actually emerge through multiple independent models working in parallel. This suggests that perhaps the nature of intelligence itself is more of a democracy and not some top down hierarchy.
I feel this also applies to the structure of an organization, and our society as a whole, in the past more traditional hierarchal structures were necessary but now with the means of distributing intelligence, new more organic forms of organization are possible. One of the main reasons a CEO exists is because there was no good way to coordinate the thoughts and actions of thousands of workers without central command, but now that we can instantly and cheaply spawn a bunch of specialized agents who could work it out amongst themselves, maybe the need for these more traditional structures becomes less necessary. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that we should replace all the CEOs with a bunch of collectively intelligent bots whom we are just now learning to control and safeguard against, but I do think that this is closer to how our organization will look in the future.
In this strange new world, maybe hierarchy is more of a constraint than a feature? Both the Hawkins brain theory and DeepMind’s Patchwork AGI framework imply that Intelligence scales through distributed specialization, not centralized control and that top-down power structures might be actively preventing us from being as intelligent and well organized as we could be. 🤔
