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Robert Miles has an interesting response to the claim that corporations are AIs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5pUA3LsEaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5p

• zaphar 6y ago
  I don't think the comparison was to AI as a super intelligence. AI doesn't have to be a super intelligence to be AI or to be dangerous.
  • WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    I think AS (Artificial Stupidity) will get us first.
    • nekopa 6y ago
      Just NO. Artificial Stupidity (AS) will never be able to perform at the level of Actually Seen Stupidity (ASS). No matter how much you try to improve AS, God will always create a better ASS. You will always be limited by priors to create an AS, but ASS will evolve naturally, plus if God ever decides to use science and apply a Directed Acyclic Tangent (DAT) well, DAT ASS would be unbeatable.
  • jengleton 6y ago
    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.
    • lukev 6y ago
      How is "converting the entire mass of the solar system into dollar bills" conceptually different from "converting the habitability of Earth into dollar bills" or "converting the health problems of human beings into a maximal amount of dollar bills", which is precisely what many corporations _actually do_? The "corporation as AI" metaphor isn't about some abstract future possibility, it's an explanatory mechanism for how the world is so thoroughly messed up _right now_.
      • namenotrequired 6y ago
        The fact that you're alive proves there is a pretty big difference, whatever it is
        • bigiain 6y ago
          Or perhaps that your particular perspective is blinkered to seeing too short a timeframe? There's a very good argument top be made, I think, that "capitalism" is the biggest and most dangerous ponzi scheme ever invented. Most people will happily participate thinking "this is fine .gif" while untapped suckers/resources keep dropping enough "return" to early "investors", but when the house of cards all collapses there will be no underlying foundation for the vast majority and only the people at the very very top of the pyramid scheme ever actually benefited at all. Ever stopped to wonder why Musk ands Bezos are so interested in going to Mars???
      • jengleton 6y ago
        Yeah, I agree. My original post was bringing up what I thought was an interesting comparison between hypothetical software AI and the corporations-as-AI metaphor presented in the talk. Corporations _are_ acting as misaligned optimizers. Solving that problem is hugely important. However, the "AI" comparison breaks down somewhat when you start thinking about how we might actually fix the problem. With corporations, we (i.e., states) have tools that we can use to regulate bad actors. Software AI, however hypothetical at the moment, seems likely to be a different game all-together.
  • flir 6y ago
    Ok, but in that case, isn't there a better analogy with a plague, rather than an AI?
    • bigiain 6y ago
      Intelligence (artificial or human) as a plague - is an idea that's spun out interesting storylines already. On a geological timescale scale, it's very likely that's what the historians of the hyper-intelligent shade of the colour blue will write about us: "There was once a virulent disease emerging on a single watery planet 1/3rd of the way along a spiral arm in some uninteresting galaxy. Fortunately the Universe's immune system never even needed to take action. It was greedy and short lived and starved itself of resources and died out before it had even metastasised much beyond it's own gravity well, it barely made it to it's next closest planet, and sent nothing out of that solar system's gravity well but a couple of primitive machines and all that daytime TV that was fashionable for a brief period a few Type-O main sequences ago..."
  • bigiain 6y ago
    In fact sub-par artificial intelligence is probably at least as dangerous as sub-par human intelligence, when we let it loose with significant power/authority in the real world. (for supporting evidence to this claim, see "high frequency trading", "self driving cars", and "the leader of the free world" <smirk>)
    • antepodius 6y ago
      Sub-par intelligence crashes some cars, causes some wars. Superintelligence turns our whole forward light-cone into paperclips; it's a bit worse.
      • ben_w 6y ago
        It doesn’t need to be super to do that — even bacteria are a type of von-Neuman machine that can turn us into more of themselves. An ASI could convince you that turning yourself into a paperclip is a fun and exciting new opportunity to liberate you from $PERSONAL_PAIN and finally allow you freedom to engage in $PERSONAL_FANTASY.
        • the8472 6y ago
          Bacteria are self-limiting. Their offspring compete and they don't reshape their environment to be more friendly to their existence. They don't plan for space colonization either. They're a bit of a toy model for a maximizer, not the real threat of an intelligent, self-modifying maximizer.
          • WJW 6y ago
            The only argument that seems to be brought forward every time is "if a superintelligent being wants to do stuff, we can't do anything about it because the axiom is that superintelligence means omnipotence". This is not so different from any other religious argument since it's impossible to falsify and therefore meaningless in any scientific sense.
            • 6y ago
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• ganzuul 6y ago
  This is why standardized testing works against improving aggregate intelligence. We probably have not seen anything close to what human minds are capable of if nurtured to express their differences.
• anonytrary 6y ago
  The buzzwordhood of "AI" has reached a new peaked. If any complex system can just be labelled as AI, then the term is essentially meaningless.
  • Nasrudith 6y ago
    Personally I saw it as a semi-sarcastic equivalence noting the lack of differences and a note about the Chinese Room. It is like describing human capabilities as equivalent to a black box algorithm - we might not know how our brain parses 2 + 2 = 4 but we know that it calculates and must follow some sort of procedure.
  • ekianjo 6y ago
    I think we just realize now how meaningless it was to begin with.
• Chathamization 6y ago
  > 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.
  • jengleton 6y ago
    So I think the question is: when a group of people work together on something, can they generate ideas which are better than the best idea of any member of the group? If so, how much better? How does the effect scale as the size of the group increases? An R&D lab certainly can do more work than any single person could do in their lifetime, but are the ideas fundamentally better? Can you point to an idea and say: "no person could possibly have thought of that"?
    • Chathamization 6y ago
      I'd say yes. Do you think the ideas that came from the Manhattan Project didn't exceed that of the best individual involved? Or for a more extreme example - consider the totality of human civilization as an example of groups of humans working together. People like Einstein and Hawking wouldn't have been able to have had the ideas they did if they were dropped in 20,000 BC. The knowledge we have now isn't simply the work of individual animals with extraordinary thoughts, it's the result of large groups of these animals working together. Now certainly the benefits in corporate R&D labs don't come anywhere close, but I find it hard to believe that they simply drop to zero.
      • jengleton 6y ago
        In the video linked above, Robert Miles models organizational idea-generation as something like "everyone thinks of their best idea, and then we just pick the best from that set". That's definitely a simplification. I do think there's some notion of "synergy", where people working together can hammer an idea into shape more effectively than either could alone. However, I suspect that there's also a counter-force, a "diminishing returns" effect: as more people get involved in an organization, coordination becomes more difficult, communication becomes more expensive. If this converges to some limit, then that's the smartest a human organization can be. Maybe better methods of organizing knowledge could help raise that limit, or more effective modes of communication, but my suspicion is that the upper bound for "organizational decision making capability" is within one or two orders of magnitude of a single person, not vastly more. No idea how we'd actually quantify that, of course!
• bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  Corporations have multiple decision making nodes that each can have the intelligence level as a smart human, thus more smart human level decisions can be undertaken by a corporation than can be undertaken by a smart human. At the same time corporations can process much more data, store more data, and do more interesting things with data than the smartest human alone could do.
• grawprog 6y ago
  By that logic, wouldn't any organization, team or group of people doing things together be an ai? Corporations aren't the only kind of grouping of people together one or more purposes as a unit. This definition also seems to ignore the 'artificial' part of artificial intelligence. If we're going to stretch the definition of ai that thin, wouldn't a school of fish or a flock of birds be considered 'ai'? Or at least an ant colony or bee hive? What about forests? They form vast networks of interdependent nodes through mycorrhizae that connect the roots of all the trees and shrubs in the forest. It's used to pass nutrients and information in the form of electrical and chemical signals throughout the network. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_network https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_network In what way does a corporation fit the definition of an ai that all these other things do not?
  • jengleton 6y ago
    If I were to paraphrase the comparison, it might be something like: "An AI is some constructed entity which, starting with a goal, uses its intelligence to make changes to the world in order to bring that goal to fruition. One of the things about AI that is worrying is that its system-of-values might have no relation whatsoever to those possessed by human beings, and the best way for it to accomplish its goals might be to do things that most people would consider quite nasty. AI systems that are trying to maximize something are in constant tension with the laws that we put in place to try to keep them from steamrolling over everything in pursuit of their goals. Corporations fit the bill, under the assumption that the goal is 'maximize shareholder value'." While a nest of ants or a swarm of bees certainly exhibit interesting emergent behavior, perhaps even collective intelligence, they 1). aren't constructed and 2). don't have clear goals. You could argue that smaller groups of people fit the bill too, I guess. Maybe the difference is that corporations tend to have distinct goals which outlive their members, and that they have special recognition under the law as independent entities. Not sure.
    • ekianjo 6y ago
      Bees and alors have a clear goal. To survive and thrive. Which is very similar to a company's actual goals. How they do it is ever changing. Corporations dont survive by making the same product for hundreds of years, so whatever subgoal they have keeps changing as well.
• photonemitter 6y ago
  If we break AI apart and look at it; Artificial - human made. (As opposed to something emerging from nature) Intelligence - ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills, (oriented agency modulated by prior experience or observations) Slightly tongue in cheeky; in most countries it seems corporations gained the right to vote before many minorities (or even majorities) [citation needed?]. If we assert that voting is the measure by which one affects political power