The automatic corporation?
The intermediate step to a fully automated corporation is one where tasks requiring humans are performed not by employees but are broken into micro-tasks and fulfilled by crowdsourcing (using, for example, services like Mechanical Turk).
Corporations do not scale, and eventually die. That’s because they scale sub-linearly. Their productivity metrics scale by an exponent of ⅘ on the number of employees.
I hypothesize that the management overhead which makes corporations grow sub-linearly is due to the limited information processing capability of individual humans. People at the top do not have local on-the-ground information: how are individual products performing, what are customers’ complaints etc. And the rank-and-file folks on the ground do not have the relevant high-level information: how does what I’m doing translate to the value that the corporation as a whole seeks to maximize? In fact, the the flow of value and information is so complex that employees have pretty much given up on determining that relationship, and know of it only at a macro P&L-center level.
An algorithm will have no such problems with acting on both global as well as fine-grained local information. In fact, I suspect that the more information it gets to act on, the better decisions it will make, making automatic corporations grow super-linearly.
More here, all fascinating, on the concept of an automatic corporation.
When the idea of two-pizza teams was first proposed at Amazon, it was an attempt at accomplishing two thing simultaneously. On the one hand, keeping teams small was an attempt at giving them autonomy in figuring out what strategy and projects to pursue. On the other hand, since each team had to optimize on a fitness function agreed upon with senior management, it was a model for scaling Jeff Bezos and his senior management team's ability to coordinate activities across the company. If you have a limited number of people you trust to choose the fitness functions, that's still a bottleneck.
The idea of an automatic corporation would replace the humans in both the fitness function and project selection process with software which scales infinitely where humans cannot.
This may sound far-fetched, but the author Vivek Haldar notes it already exists in some forms today.
A limited version of what I’m describing already exists. High-frequency trading firms are already pure software, mostly beyond human control or comprehension. The flash crash of 2010 demonstrated this. Companies that are centered around logistics, like FedEx or Walmart, can be already thought of as complex software entities where human worker bees carry out the machine’s instructions.
This happens naturally, because over time more and more of the business logic of a company becomes encoded in software. Humans still have some control (or so they think) but mostly what they’re doing is supplying parameters to the computation. A modern corporation is so complex that it does not fit in the brain of a single person (or a small number of persons). Software carries the slack.
Free-dimensional cinematography
We saw a glimpse of this with Bullet Time in the Matrix movies and with Microsoft's Photosynth, but now a company called Replay Technologies has come up with the next evolution in what they call Free Dimensional Video.
Our technology works by capturing reality not as just a two-dimensional representation, but as a true three-dimensional scene, comprised of three-dimensional “pixels” that faithfully represent the fine details of the scene. This information is stored as a freeD™ database, which can then be tapped to produce (render) any desired viewing angle from the detailed information.
This enables a far superior way of capturing reality, which allows breaking free from the constraints of where a physical camera with a particular lens had been placed, allowing a freedom of viewing which has endless possibilities.
Essentially, you can choose any camera angle in post and the software can recreate it even if there was no camera shooting from that vantage point.
You can see an example of this in the tennis replays in the video below.
Amazing, and also refreshing, for once, to see a video technology debut in sports broadcast coverage instead of pornography.
The instant-on computer
A long time ago, when I was at Amazon, someone asked Jeff Bezos during an employee meeting what he thought would be the single thing that would most transform Amazon's business.
Bezos replied, "An instant-on computer." He went on to explain that he meant a computer that when you hit a button would instantly be ready to use. Desktops and laptops in those days, and still even today, had a really long bootup process. Even when I try to wake my Macbook Pro from sleep, the delay is bothersome.
Bezos imagined that people with computers which were on with the snap of a finger would cause people to use them more frequently, and the more people were online, the more they'd shop from Amazon. It's like the oft-cited Google strategy of just getting more people online since it's likely they'd run across an ad from Google somewhere given its vast reach.
We now live in that age, though it's not the desktops and laptops but our tablets and smart phones that are the instant-on computers. Whether it's transformed Amazon's business, I can't say; they have plenty going for them. But it's certainly changed our usage of computers generally. I only ever turn off my iPad or iPhone if something has gone wrong and I need to reboot them or if I'm low on battery power and need to speed up recharging.
In this next age, anything that cannot turn on instantly and isn't connected to the internet at all times will feel deficient.
Juan Genoves
In the lobby of Daniel hangs a giant painting by Juan Genoves. I had not heard of Genoves until last weekend in NYC when I attended my niece's first birthday at Daniel, but I really liked his painting of a crowd of people seen from high overhead. The “crowd” is one of the recurring themes in his work.
Up close, his paintings have a 3D quality as the quantity of the paint used for each person in the crowd rises a bit off the canvas, reinforcing the depth created by each person's shadow.