It was bad enough when Mitt Romney declared that "corporations are people, my friend." It is bad enough after generations of serial failure that there are still dead-ender defenders of Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence still insisting that software is intelligent or is going to be intelligent any minute now, and sooper-intelligent soon after. But it is, well, special to say the least to hear a Very Serious Futurologist proposing that legally-fictitious corporate personages are secretly struggling to abort science-fictional sooper-intelligent software personages in their womb-labs in some kind of cosmic struggle for supremacy for real.
You should definitely read the Comments on this one.
Needless to say "corporate personhood" is in fact a metaphor that has provided figure and frames for a series of catastrophically anti-democratizing legal arguments and decisions, especially since the US Civil War.
ReplyDeleteThe corporate form has taken many different guises historically, and its shifting terms reflect historical struggles among actually intelligent human stakeholders. This crucial reality is completely obscured by loose talk such as this:
"Corporations are entities/ organisms unto themselves these days, with wills and cognitive structures quite distinct from the people that comprise them... corporations [are] emergent, self-organizing, coherent minds of their own."
These statements are worse than false, they derange our capacity to look clearly at what is true about what corporations are, and what is done in their names, and what they enable and frustrate as frameworks mediating the conduct of some people in relation to others.
In the past, corporate charters have included termination dates beyond which the corporation would dissolve, strict circumscriptions of the tasks to which a corporation could be devoted, requirements limiting the pay of officers as compared to hired workers, clauses insisting that corporations conduct themselves in ways that do not threaten the public good, and so on.
These are rarely a part of the image or story of corporations today, of course, but in the past many of them were commonplaces, and sensible democratically minded people of good will can certainly struggle to re-introduce them back into the story of this organizational form.
Pretending corporations are people will no more help in that work than pretending software is people will help in the work to make software more user-friendly or networks more secure. Futurists are completely in thrall to disastrously inapt metaphors -- but metaphors which enable them to tell very simple very dramatic stories that entertain the rubes.
> But it is, well, **special**. . . to hear. . . that
ReplyDelete> legally-fictitious corporate personages are secretly
> struggling to abort science-fictional sooper-intelligent
> software personages in their womb-labs in some kind
> of cosmic struggle for supremacy for real.
I have a friend who likes to compare human bureaucracies
(including corporations) to badly-programmed computers,
often acting much less intelligently in the aggregate than
their individual human employees. That analogy doesn't
bear **too** much weight, of course.
Even looser is the analogy between a corporation and an
actual biological organism. Similar analogies have been
proposed before, of course, both "seriously"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain
and in fiction, as in Olaf Stapledon's _Last and First Men_.
And apparently at least one philosopher was examining
the idea almost 2000 years ago, according to a page I stumbled
on.
http://books.google.com/books?id=PiphRocVYRwC&pg=PA102&lpg=PA102&dq=Stapledon+%22corporate+intelligence%22&source=bl&ots=5IyQSyPSSZ&sig=DDPeCdVinH7JxBPkLS419QkOxJk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=3ZVsT7iODIPe0gGyzM31Bg&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Stapledon%20%22corporate%20intelligence%22&f=false
The analogy would seem to be bolstered by what contemporary
biology knows about extreme cases of symbiosis -- leading first
to the eukaryotic cell, and later to multicellular organisms.
But to suggest that corporations are **literally** intelligent,
with motives, will, and consciousness of their own, seems to be
stretching a fanciful literary conceit (which might be as
entertaining in a satirical novel as Samuel Butler's riff
on the idea of Darwininian evolution among artifacts in "The Book
of the Machines" in _Erewhon_) beyond the point of usefulness
in a serious argument, futurological or otherwise. If so,
it wouldn't be the first time for overheated >Hists.
On the other hand, maybe the article is what the Brits call
a "piss-take".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taking_the_piss
;->
> But to suggest that corporations are **literally** intelligent,
ReplyDelete> with motives, will, and consciousness of their own, seems to be
> stretching [it]
If they were, they would of course be very wealthy,
very powerful **psychopaths**.
http://www.naturalnews.com/032814_corporations_psychopath.html
(I suppose I shouldn't go so far as to suggest that most
of the people running corporations probably are literally
psychopaths. ;-> )
(But they are, Blanche, they are!)
I think what you mean to say is that they'd be wealthy sociopaths. As corporations don't tend to be impulsive. But to even go down that road is to anthropomorphize them unfairly. Although it might be an apt description of Mitt Romney.
ReplyDeleteCorporations are essentially a group of individuals and it's misleading to assign them a personality.
> I think what you mean to say is that they'd be wealthy
ReplyDelete> sociopaths. As corporations don't tend to be impulsive.
The distinctions between "psychopath" and "sociopath" have
always been a bit unclear, actually. The terms are often used
interchangeably. When I first learned them, in a university
abnormal psych class back in 1973, the words had distinct implications
having to do with the presumed etiology of the condition --
"sociopath" implied environmental causation (e.g.,
childhood abuse) whereas "psychopath" implied innateness
(the born-to-be "bad seed"). These days, "sociopath" seems
most often to mean what the DSM calls "Antisocial Personality
Disorder" whereas "psychopath" isn't in the DSM at all --
it's generally used to mean the putative (and still controversial)
syndrome characterized by Hervey Cleckley and Robert D. Hare.
Speaking of psychopaths, though --
I'm currently reading Jonathan Haidt's most recent book,
_The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics
and Religion_
http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307377903/
He mentions that since the enlightenment, the two most popular
theories of ethics have been utilitarianism (Jeremy Bentham,
John Stuart Mill) and deontology (Immanuel Kant). Haidt
jokingly refers to these in the context of a moral-theory-as-cuisine
analogy he develops as the "utilitarian grill" and the
"deontological diner". Anyway, he points out along the
way the interesting likelihood that Jeremy Bentham, an early
utilitarian philosopher, had Asperger's Syndrome --
extremely high systemizing combined with extremely low
empathy (in Simon Baron-Cohen's terms); and that Kant,
while probably not as low on the empathy scale as Bentham,
was still likely somewhere on the autistic spectrum.
(Of course, such post-hoc diagnoses of historical figures
are very controversial and would be dismissed outright
by many historians and psychologists.)
Desultorily searching this topic on the Web, I was amused
to discover, on a blog owned by a well-known
Singularity-and-Friendly-AI guru, a long thread about
the putative connection between Asperger's and
utilitarianism (and consequentialism -- both beloved of
the crowd that gathers around this blog; they like
ethics that promises, on the surface at least, to be
reducible to math, and to the sort of algorithm
that could be programmed on a digital computer).
http://lesswrong.com/lw/28l/do_you_have_highfunctioning_aspergers_syndrome
I also discovered the following article:
"Utilitarians Aren't Psychopaths—Are They?"
by Mark D. White, Ph.D.
September 25, 2011
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/maybe-its-just-me/201109/utilitarians-arent-psychopaths-are-they
"As _The Economist_ recently wrote, a forthcoming paper in
_Cognition_ reports that experiment participants 'who indicated greater
endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures
of psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness'
(from the paper abstract)."
Golly, Batman!
> "Utilitarians Aren't Psychopaths—Are They?"
ReplyDelete> http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/maybe-its-just-me/201109/utilitarians-arent-psychopaths-are-they
>
> [A] forthcoming paper in _Cognition_ reports that experiment
> participants 'who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian
> solutions had higher scores on measures of psychopathy,
> machiavellianism. . .
The perils of utilitarianism as PR:
http://futurisms.thenewatlantis.com/2012/03/arguing-with-transhumanists.html
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Ari pointed out on the show something that ["the brutally rational", in
Kyle Munkittrick's words, Robin] Hanson said recently — that “if male lives
are more pleasant overall, it is good that we create more of them
instead of female lives.” . . . When confronted with his own words, Hanson
didn’t retreat; he stood by those remarks. Today, one of Hanson’s blog
readers took him to task: “You totally let yourself look like you’d
support sexism.... You made us look bad and ... I doubt you’ll have
an opportunity to repair the damage your mistake caused.” I certainly
agree that Hanson’s comments make transhumanism look bad — not because
he misspoke or misrepresented his views, but because his forthright
comments revealed the heartless calculation that underlies much
transhumanist thinking.