smif

Seems like it, doesn't it? I'd be curious to see if and how we can get there. What I was highlighting are some serious challenges along the way that might end up leading us to insights about why it might be harder than we think, or why there may be factors that we aren't considering.

It's very easy to say "brain is made of fundamental particles and forces, all we have to do is create a similar configuration or a model of them," but it's precisely in the task of understanding the higher order patterns of those fundamental particles and forces where we seem to run into some serious challenges that as of yet remain unaddressed.

The AI/ML way of approaching this is more of a top-down approach, where we just sort of ignore the fact that we don't understand how our own brains/minds work and just try to build something kind of like it in the folksy sense. I'm not discouraging that approach, but I'm very curious to see where it will lead us.

This is probably not the path to GI. First we would need a precise scientific formalism to accurately describe intelligence, which currently does not exist. Second, it may or may not end up being tied to consciousness, and there's a thing called the hard problem of consciousness, that possibly might not be solvable.

It might end up being the kind of thing where if you want to accurately model consciousness, you would need a computer the size of the universe, and it's gotta run for like 13.8 billion years or so, but that's just my own pure speculation - I don't think anybody even has a clue on where to start tackling this problem.

This is not to discourage progress in the field. I'm personally very curious to see where all this will lead. However, if I had to place a bet, it wouldn't be on GI coming any time soon.

Don't forget to multiply by the square root of 2 (management overhead coefficient). Also note that this is an irrational number so it has a subtle jab at management built-in.

The overwhelming majority of people work because they realistically have no choice but to work.

There is no amount of neoliberal salad dressing that you can douse that with to make it more palatable to anyone.

Doing shit because you have no choice but to do it sucks, period.

> I'm not sure there are any solutions other than customized and active management.

I think this is the real issue here. People are not replaceable parts and it's very hard to come up with generalizeable solutions.

Maybe one thing we could do as an industry is switch mindsets from predictive models (i.e. "if we just implement XYZ methodology, the team will do better") to reactive models (i.e. "something is going wrong, we should try to understand it and change something"). This is probably just a roundabout way of describing the customized and active management that you mentioned, but I also think that sometimes these problems can be structural.

For example, sometimes a team member leaving can have detrimental effects because they weren't just a programmer, they were also the social glue holding the team together. Conversely, sometimes adding (or replacing) someone can bring about a situation where it feels like there are too many cooks in the kitchen, even if the overall team size hasn't changed much (or at all).

Maybe one area to look at with respect to people gaming the system is around people's personal values and how they track with the org's. These can be hard to gauge and people will intentionally misrepresent them because they want that job and the money that comes with it, so they are prepared to say what you want to hear. Also in larger organizations, sometimes the values statements are very dilute and not really saying anything. For example, saying "success" is a value is pretty useless because everyone wants to succeed. That's not a value, that's just effectively a no-op generic filler statement.