Post-Intelligence Company Hierarchies

There are a lot of discussions about how software interviews are broken. Combined with the recent twitter conflict around H1Bs and the potential of AI to replace all of knowledge work I think it's important to think about what a post-intelligence world actually means for company hierarchies.

Interviews essentially stack rank incoming applicants and look for hard-to-fake signals. LEET code style interviews are controversial but are correlated with general intelligence, age of a new grad, willingness to grind, etc...

The most important part of the signal is that is should be rare yet deserving of respect.

Culturally this manifests as constant anxiety about not being "smart enough" but practically it acts as a directional vector onto which hierarchies can align and humans can coordinate without infighting over the status quo.

Maintaining organizational cohesion is more important that being able to the do the job.

As an example, you may be interviewing with someone looking for a replacement due to a promotion to tech-lead. You want to signal worthiness, but not in a way that threatens organization cohesion.

If the internal signal is disconnected from a real world signal, it can create a "dead sea effect" where external values need to be contorted into the internal values via motivation/coercion like equity/visas or risk evaporation of willing participants.

Increasingly powerful AIs will increase this conflict even more as every job boils down into "Who has the right to prompt"

Here are four more predictions on how organization hierarchies could change:

# Effect 1 - Social Capital Becomes More Important

From an executive's POV, a company basically IS an blackbox intelligence that acts based on prompts but only accepts FounderCoin as payment.

When the ability-to-do-the-job is no longer a factor then the game is about responsibility and risk for the "Capital" you are trusted to manage.

This already happens at the above-the-prompt level in existing hierarchies. When the job is prompting the organization, forms of social capital like Former Roommate can entitle you to more FounderCoin than raw intelligence because the trust in the integrity and alignment of the prompt is more important than the execution.

Any organizational capacity that is below-the-prompt is increasingly commoditized and only the island of above-the-prompt is safe.

# Effect 2 - Company Jungian Individuation

While social capital within an organization becomes more important, regular capital outside of organizations becomes more potent. It become easier to start new companies and scale to infinity as cost of executing on an idea falls.

So while being a part of any one specific company will feel less meritocratic, there will be more opportunities to create or choose from a larger variety of hierarchies of value.

Companies will go through a Jungian individuation process with an extreme of every individual a solo founder simultaneously going through their own individuation process.

# Effect 3 - Managers become Therapists

Managers will act as domain-aware therapists. Instead of technical obstacles, the manager steers the team through nihilistic obstacles by managing the emergent story of the team.

Per Venkatesh Rao

Overall there will be less need for managers due to flatter and smaller structures but the ones that remain will act as therapist-priests. They will need to be able to diagnose nihilistic wounds, explain how local stories fit into the overarching universal Story, and also deal with the occasional one-shotting by Ayahuasca.

# Effect 4 - Painful Virtue Signaling

Proof-of-alignment will be the most important signal to gain access to increased prompt responsibility.

Virtue signaling will become more painful and cloying. People will write in all lowercase as a career optimization. It will no longer be enough to hold a relatively unknown opinion regarding shrimp euthanasia since high value opinions will be known and gamified.

Signaling will adapt to be more difficult to fake requiring increasing amounts of sacrifice such as swearing off shrimp or going on Jain diets.

Individuals will either successfully contort by becoming the new identity, or they will be rejected by anti-bodies and start their own company.

Anyone below-the-prompt will live in constant anxiety up until the post-scarcity tipping point.