“Machine Organizations” by Vaniver

OpenAI is nothing without its people On November 20th, 2023, this was tweeted by many OpenAI employees as a sign of solidarity with Sam Altman in his conflict with the then-board. OpenAI published a blog post yesterday about Research acceleration; they have successfully hit the target of an ‘automated research intern’ that they set for themselves and hope to have an automated AI researcher by March of 2028. At some point in the foreseeable future, OpenAI could be something without its people. But what? My default medium-term scenario for continued AI escalation is still global takeover where humans are entirely displaced, but it seems worth investigating scenarios wherein AIs and humans coexist, at least briefly. Historically I have thought this case was not particularly relevant. It seemed like an AGI that became significantly economically competitive would also be significantly strategically competitive, because of underlying general capacities, and the transition period thus relatively short. But this is perhaps not taking into account Moravec's paradox. Humans have long used machines to accomplish their ends. Many tasks currently performed by machines were once performed by humans, and a large fraction of our modern abundance comes from the ability of machines to perform [...] The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: September 7th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zmC5Nhx36wt47WHfu/machine-organizations --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.