I’ve said before that wars are exchanges of information with terrible human consequences, and if the competition between human workers and automation isn’t exactly a war, it’s certainly a bloodless coup. Tasks that can be completed by both humans and robots will eventually be totally taken from our hands, completely roboticized.

The Browser pointed me to “The Automatic Corporation,” a blog post by Google software engineer Vivek Haldar which wonders if corporations can be 100% automated. That’s likely not possible for most entities, but the thought experiment does demonstrate how much more creative destruction is coming our way courtesy of algorithms. The opening:

“Corporations can be thought of as information-processing feedback loops. They propose products, introduce them into the marketplace, learn from the performance of the products, and adjust. They do this while trying to maximize some value function, typically profit.

So why can’t they be completely automated? I mean that literally. Could we have software that carries out all those functions?

Software could propose new products within a design space. It could monitor the performance of those products in the marketplace, and then learn from the feedback and adjust accordingly, all while maximizing its value function. If the product is a webapp, most of these steps are already within the reach of full automation. For physical products, what’s missing is APIs that allow a program to order physical products, and move them around in the physical world.

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.”