iamtrask: agent swarms may avoid the three failure modes that doom flat human hierarchies
iamtrask · x · 2026-10-20
iamtrask proposes a hypothesis: humans struggle with flat hierarchies because of three constraints — overload (can't hear a million people, so we appoint leaders), privacy (can't share private info with everyone, so we appoint trusted third parties), and veracity (can't vet everyone's trustworthiness, so we appoint trusted people). Agent swarms may not share these failure modes: they scale to absorb enormous information, can provably forget things (e.g. GPU enclaves), and their entire history can be audited and logged to ground trust for all parties. He invites debate on the idea.
Related event: iamtrask: Agent Swarms May Avoid Flat Organizations' Failure Modes(2 posts)→
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