Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

Corporations are nothing but a group of actors working together to achieve some outcome, part of which may be profit, and it's absurd to think that they are a 'Modern Era', or even Western concept as every single land-owning farmer, artisan, banker, merchant in history was de-facto a form of 'corporation'. Moreover, many institutions with origins in antiquity (schools, governments, NGO's) are close enough to the organising principles of corporations that they could be regarded in the same, broad, social categorisation.

His 18th century definition of 'Corporation' fits perfectly with the notion of 'Petit Bourgeois' of history - minor land-holding families, technical guilds, larger artisanal groups. Do we think Athenian 'Trireme' warships were built by a guy and his assistants? No, these were built by well organised groups with specialisation, paid for their work, aka 'Corporations'.

The most interesting thing about these talks are actually social: what kinds of ideas and memes will rise to the fore among people who are aspirationally antagonising, like social anarchists (I don't mean that in a negative sense, I mean that would be the closest technical 'ideal' that defines the a group like 'Chaos Computer Club'). Mohawks, anti-estabishment statements such as 'ardent atheist', and hints of softly anti-corporate ideals.

"Life-span of corporation is shorter, largely due to predation (totally unsubstantiated), corporation's are cannibals, they eat one another (that's an interesting way to describe mergers)."

"For the first century and a 1/2 they depended entirely on human employees" - no, actually, the Industrial Revolution was literally about harnessing the power of fossil fuels via machines to automate that which would have been done by people (or animals) before. Neither humans nor horses moved those trains.

And then of course the dehumanising of governments and corporations as AI: "What do our AI Overlords want?".

I don't believe there is really any relationship between 'corporations' and 'AI', it's a neat idea. What we have here is an intelligent, creative guy with an antagonists worldview, working in a field wherein he's free to make up loose associations and hint at them as they are facts, ad he's subsumed an interesting ideal from CS into his own world view.

I mean, it's great to try ideas that bends our minds a little bit, but I think it's clear he's a writer of fiction.

I think AS (Artificial Stupidity) will get us first.

That's fair. I interpreted the comparison as being between "AI implemented as a property of human organizations" and "AI implemented as a powerful search algorithm". While corporations can certainly be dangerous, they're still made of people and thus are unlikely to want to do things like "convert the entire mass of the solar system into dollar bills" (and even if they did, they'd have a hard time doing it). A sufficiently powerful search algorithm would find all sorts of bizarre ways of satisfying its goals. The point is that the scope of the risk is quite different when talking about corporations (order of magnitude: screwing up the environment in pursuit of easy profit) vs "real" AI which, if granted agency, would have potentially unbounded risk.

Another way to look at it is with regards to capacity for self-modification. If a corporation can't re-structure itself into being much smarter than the smartest human, its intelligence is fundamentally limited, and therefore so is the risk. Does software have this restriction? We don't really know yet, but it's hard to point to exactly why it would.

> In the sense that a corporation's maximum intelligence is likely to be in the same ballpark as the smartest humans, it can't be seen as a true superintelligence.

In what sense? Certainly the ability of large groups of people to research and create new technology exceed the ability of a single individual. The R&D capabilities of a large corporation are going to vastly exceed that of a lone hermit in the woods.

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America , by Chris Hedges, was published in 2007.