Musings on the nature of organizations and emergent behaviors:

Emergent behaviors have always fascinated me, originally as a means to a truely sentient AI. My first experience with the concept was in Mass Effect with the Geth species: an artificial race made of individual units that all communicate with each other. A individual can do simple tasks for labor, and shares its sensory data with nearby units to more efficiently complete its task. This eventually escalates and with a world of these units communicating, eventually one asks “Does this unit have a soul?” 

Now obviously the inspiration here is from real life. Ants are amazing because of the simple individual units that combine to make colonies, which exhibit complex and diverse behaviors that no individual would ever be capable of. Most of my searches for examples in humans leads basically to ant replicating human behavior. I guess that makes sense, as humans are already capable of complex behavior, and so any complex behavior in a large group of humans can be attributed to individuals making complex decisions. However, I haven’t been able to find anything on the emergent behaviors of human organizations, and I think this is often overlooked.

When enough people come together to form an organization, many emergent behaviors not present in the individuals can become defining characteristic of that organization, not all more complex. Organizations I need to define to proceed, are any sufficiently large group of humans who, naturally, organize together towards an abstract Idea, and more often that Idea is a goal. While it may seem obvious, I need to point out that organizations are not people, despite being made up of them and having their own motivation and ambition. They have their own behaviors that they are capable of and express. One that I find incredibly common, and perhaps fundamental to organizations, is sociopathy. When an organization is centered around a goal, something achievable and maybe conceivable to an individual human, that organization will work towards that goal sociopathicly. The goal can be anything: discovery, creation of a tool, the well being of humans, the exploration of space, or money. It is organizations centered around money that I am concerned with.

I haven’t proved that organizations are sociopathic, and doubt in my uneducated ramblings can, however, I hope to demonstrate why I think it is true, using publicly traded corporations as a case study to do so. With these corporations, they are legally required to try and make the most money for the stock holders. This is their goal and motivation, making money is to them as eating is to us: it is required for their existence. For us, the requirement is from the laws of nature, for corporations, the requirement is from the laws of humans. I don’t have a full understanding of how organizations exploit individual human behavior to achieve their goal, but they do use humans. Even assuming each and every human in the organization isn’t sociopathic and is has empathy, the net combined actions will always lead towards the attempt of the goal. A manager may be kind hearted and give more leeway towards employees than is good for the corporation, but through the exploitation of human nature, that manager will be replaced by someone less forgiving or will have been the one to be less forgiving and contribute a net positive towards the goal of profit.

Once again, I don’t think I can prove it, and I’m not sure if scientists have been able to prove the mechanics of ant colonies and their complex behavior. However, if we take the theory that organizations are sociopathic in their goals, then that explains so much of our world and how companies can be so evil, in our human eyes at least. Corporations are doing essentially what humans like to do with food, eat as much of it as we can. Humans are self aware though, and through thought can realize the damage of gluttony even if the chemicals in our brain tell us to eat as much as we can for our own survival. I guess, if we work towards understanding the emergent behavior of organizations, and can figure out how to alter them so that they become self aware of the danger of greed. Maybe they already are, after all, a company doesn’t engage in overtly inhumane ways for short-term greed, because it knows through the existence and demise of corporations that have done that and failed because of the market rejecting their gluttonous predatory behavior. The same way we know not to eat as much as we can because it will lead to a shorter life.

The more I write here the more it becomes clear to me that I just have a theory and can’t even demonstrate it, let alone prove it. I think that it is a useful way to think about organizations and hope that maybe we will see research into emergent behaviors in human social structures and how they can be changed to suit the needs of humans rather than inhuman and sociopathic organizations.