By "big" I mean problems that require many distinct, intelligent decisions. These problems always has and always will require very large groups of people working cooperatively. For example, the Apollo program at it's peak employed 34,000 NASA employees and 375,000 contractors [1]. This is really a point of semantics though, not really worth debating.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

We only need that many people because our tools weren't sufficiently advanced at the time. We had to invent a lot of things on the fly there.

So today this could be done by 2 founders without bosses? (the topic of this thread)

Eventually, yes.

For example right now a duo are preparing to do a manned space flight, which would have been unthinkable 30 years ago.

http://copenhagensuborbitals.com/

http://copenhagensuborbitals.com/personel.php

Me: This works with 2 people. You: Yes, look, here they do it with 22 people.

2 of them are described as "Lead" which is contrary to the point you want to make: "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss."

Additionally the problem of putting someone in space is different from putting someone on the moon and back again.

like matt said, I think eventually yes. It seems silly to us now, just as it seemed silly back a couple hundred years ago that you can run a farm with just a handful of people and even produce more food.

But when you have many tools and building blocks , the problem doesn't require many intelligent decisions anymore , and isn't "big" by the definition given by the parent thread.

What to you is a "big problem"?

I find myself thinking of SpaceX, which is tackling a real challenge and "big problem". They have, according to Wikipedia, more than 1250 employees.

It use to be that you required larger teams to build software as a solution to problems before. As software tools get better and infrastructure tools get cheaper, it's more and more feasible to solve problems with software with a smaller and smaller team.

That, along with the trend of software being used to solve more and more problems (more stuff is being solved by computers), it would seem like that eventually, even something like spending people to space would only take a small team, as infeasible as that seems right now.

To farmers of yore, it would seem laughable that we are able to produce a lot of food with so little farms. To builders of yore (like pyramids), it seems laughable that we're able to build taller buildings with much less people.

Given that technology and pace of innovation keeps accelerating, we should be able to solve larger class of problems with less effort and less man power.

I think that it's mostly a symptom of machines replacing humans. for example , in the past we needed humans to connect us to each other so we can collaborate. now we have the forums , search , etc...

Taking this trend to it's extreme , when we have human equivalent robots and AI , one man could build anything he wants by commanding machines to do the work.

I would qualify it like so: that government-scale problems still need government-scale employment. But they need relatively less of it now. As with a lot of things in technology the change is mostly creeping in from the bottom, turning large spaces into cheap/easy one-person problems.