alt Hacker News> Being smarter than the best-organized aggregate of all humans
Isn't there pretty much a consensus that committees and institutions are not all that smart?
I think you're confusing the categories of "intelligence" and power. Institutions are powerful. The smartest AI is still just a tool without the infrastructure to turn that into real world effects and someone to direct it.
It seems you have faith that this is inevitable and unavoidable. I get it, even rationalists succumb to religious thinking eventually. We're only human after all.
I'm genuinely baffled each time I encounter this notion that the power is dumb.
It's as if power was a kind of demigod Heracles who paves its way with sheer brute force alone.
But in reality it consists of very mortal and feeble creatures of meat and bone.
How in the world can people assume dumb those who possess all the means and rights for violence by controlling and manipulating myriads of other creatures of meat and bone, is totally beyond me.