(2026-04-15) Davies The Most Important Number

Dan Davies: the most important number. It is time to think once more about “AI in General Management”.

thesis that, to put it in vaguely cybernetic terms, a really good LLM can work as a high capacity variety attenuator and amplifier, as well as a translator and transducer. If you can boil a huge report down to three bullet points, but also expand the boss’s gnomic remarks to a full policy document, then this makes a lot of different forms of organization possible.

(I’ll explain some of the technical meanings here in a future “Beer Tasting Notes” post, but for the time being the only one that isn’t a fairly straightforward English word is “transduction”, which is a word Stafford Beer took from the cellular biology of the eye. The idea is that signals aren’t simply transmitted; only the part of the signal for which there is a structure already present to receive it. Some animals can’t see colours, for example. I am not yet quite sure what is really gained here over the concept of information being “lost in translation” but I’ll have another read to make sure.)

Particularly, it very much weakens the case for hierarchy, and I can see why a lot of people posting on the subject are interested in the possibility of it allowing for very small organizations indeed to tackle tasks which have previously required much bigger ones. (peak hierarchy)

But can it work? I think that’s a question which “smart skepticism” would definitely tell you to sidestep... it’s definitely not something to express a firm opinion on either way unless you’re cool with being made a fool of by history.

One of the things it might depend on, though, is another question that’s on my mind. Which is that a lot of the AI-enabled organisational models we’re talking about seem to rely on having most of the output produced most of the time by LLMs, with a knowledgeable human being checking them. (human in the loop)

But … checking other people’s work is also a much crapper job than doing things yourself.
It’s not cognitively demanding in terms of bandwidth, but it’s very cognitively demanding in terms of exhausting attention. Which ought to be worrying, because we know (quite spectacularly, from the world of self-driving cars), that it is very very difficult to keep paying attention when you’re monitoring a system that is meant to be A-OK most of the time, but needs you to be constantly aware because it sometimes screws up in a way that requires immediate action.

So, the number that I am interested in is something like “How many words of normal business English per day can a manager read and check for accuracy and sense, without their mind wandering and without going mad?”

I would guess that the place to look for this number might be on the editorial desks of newspapers, or in investment bank compliance departments. But I also suspect that it’s going to be difficult to get a stable, homeostatic answer.

everyone is going to want to pretend to be a 10x super-supervisor

if you fake it in this way, you won’t be aware that you’ve done something wrong, potentially for quite a while.