I see an algorithm. An algorithm run on the platform of a human machine. A human machine composed of people, each completing subroutines as tasks broken down into logical components. Some of the components involve teams, others specific individuals.
The pyramid constuction itself is not the objective function, or not the primary one. The objective function is the creation and maintenance of the human machine itself, that in turn can make pyramids or whatever else you want. How the pyramid is built within this larger system can range from a lean mean harsh system of slavery to an almost playful state of volunteerism.
This large system is obviously a network. The component of the network can be people or ants or microbes or even photons.
There is no complexity of scale, but there is complexity of components, and so complexity of connections in total. Our cellular machinery is far more complex than the most amibtious projects of the human animal, and not just through sheer numbers. When neural nets were first being played with on paper with pencil, it was quickly recognized that the sophistication of the net involved not only number of layers, but also the nodes. The simpler the nodes were in deciding to fire like a neuron, the faster the processsing speed of the net, but the cruder the results. Even more important was recognizing new connections and dropping unused ones based upon decisions of the nodes. Many of these new connections on paper were called back propagation, connections to earlier layers, into the "past". It becomes an all purpose tool, iterating itself.
Is this going to be about AI? Thankfully, no.
When I was 12, I read a book called The World of Star Trek, by David Gerrold, who wrote the "Trouble with Tribbles" episode. One of the chapters involved world building, and Gerrold used the example of what world could create the starship Enterprise, by substitutiing what the modern world needs to do to make a 747?
There are the materials and skills required to build the plane, but also the expanding network that supplied those materials and skills, until before you know it, everybody and everything in the world is involved. How do you cost that out? (The answer is when the signal of cost is swamped by all the other costs, thats' your cost, which is typcially about 18 months back).
This opened my pre-pubescent mind to the world of supply chains 50 years before I heard the phrase.
Supply chains? Supply webs! Once you start sourcing out what it takes to build, not just the airplane, but everything you need to build the airplane, all the way down to feeding little bitty babies, you realize its a gestalt. A whole greater than the sum of its parts.
It blew my tiny little mind. Material conduits as algrorithms involved in a big bang of creation called the 20th century, modern times, the monkey singularity. All from the network of funny little ape-shaped bugs.
I should have stuck with pursuing logistics, but I didn't, and here I am now, in a shitbox apartment typing on a 30-year-old computer piggybacked onto my smart phone hot spot. All of which, a mere 50 years ago, would have made little 12-year-old Johnny squeal with delight at how cool the future is. What was the point I was writing about? I forgot.
Algorithms. Is that how CEOs see people? Does Elon Musk coldly eye you for your capability, and capacity for punishment? As components, cogs within a machine, bees in a super organism? I think the psychopaths do, and as I can turn off most of my humanity when I need to, I get where they're coming from.
But we do recognize collective good and collective effort and collective care all as vastly superior to an optimal objective function.
