Companies Are Just a Graph of Algorithms

When I see a complex socioeconomic phenomenon described as "just" I know for certain that someone is about to spectacularly fail to have read books.

This is value stream mapping. No, business process reengineering. No, systems dynamics. No, a Krebs cycle. No, ...

People could always do these things. It was never a sword that only AI enthusiasts could draw from the stone. By god people, the AI has read books, can't you give it a bash too?

How many times do we have to go through this? Humans invent a new technology and think it applies to everything!

Imagine the brain as a complex series of clockwork mechanisms…

Society can be modeled as a complex series of hydraulic tubes…

Companies are really a set of APIs between different departments…

Sure, these are all somewhat useful metaphors in context. But no one has built a working brain out of Lego. Sloshing water around to model an economy didn't produce unending wealth. Most companies aren't shuffling data around SOAP endpoints and winning capitalism.

Everyone seems to think AI is useful for someone else's problem, but not their own. Is a company a series of algorithms? I guess if you squint. Really it is a set of social dynamics,interpersonal relationships, and imperfect decisions.

Given that the AI companies themselves haven't replaced all their marketing departments, accountancy, and CEOs with AI - I guess the rest of us should probably wait.

> AI excels at both discrete task execution and determining how things fit together, and every single one of your company's workflow components becomes ripe for optimization or elimination.

Why? On what basis is this claim made? They're trained to probabilistically complete patterns. Where does the confidence in this ability come from?

I don't think the atomic task based view it the right way to draw conclusions about coming business automation. There is more likely thresholds, after which it makes sense to automate entire sections, or business processes. Creating strange hybrid working situations with Automation foisted on people, will create both the overhead of the IT systems, and the inefficiencies of people trying to deal with edgecase accuracy problems and the like, or lack of skill development paths etc.

Companies are just a collection of people.

The internet is just a series of tubes.

Wow, things operate according to lists of instructions. What a concept.

I personally like this article, its concepts, its charts and its graphs...

Observation: There probably is a market for documenting all of a business's processes and workflows (which business owner wouldn't want some really cool charts of all of their business processes?), and that should be able to done quickly and cheaply with Text-to-Image LLM's (NanoBanana, ?, ???). Well, if there's value on the one side, and the ability to deliver under cost and under budget on the other, then that's a value-to-cost asymmetry and subsequently a candidate for a scalable service business...

Related:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_re-engineerin...