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I agree. I went through a period where I seriously held the same insight as the grandparent and thought that it was profound insight into the nature of the univ
by IsaacL 10y ago
I agree. I went through a period where I seriously held the same insight as the grandparent and thought that it was profound insight into the nature of the universe -- "omfg, corporations are artificial intelligences! reality is an interlocking series of patterns! collective intelligence is the future!"
I cured myself of these beliefs when I looked at how reality actually works (and when I stopped smoking weed). When Louis Gerstner turned around IBM as the company's first outside CEO, that was a result of his decisions and vision, not the emergent decision-making power of IBM. More fundamentally: people can think about companies, companies can't think about people. There are no collective minds, only individual minds working together.
The actual article in interesting. It sounds like Russian/Chinese/non-Western multinationals are growing in power, and with significantly less scruples than their Western counterparts.
- maxerickson 10y agoI totes don't smoke weed bro, not even on the weekend. My point is not really to present the thought as a deep explanatory insight into the universe but more to get people to apply an existing mythology of powerful otherness to corporations. An interesting POV to consider, nothing more. And I think that while corporations don't quite think, they do use business rules and abstracted information about individuals to trigger actions. The humans writing those rules are probably reasoning differently about the rules than they would the individual decisions. The corporation can become more than the sum of it's parts through very simple mechanisms.